Day: March 5, 2007

I needed that like I needed a hole in my head

As I was reading my email this morning, I noticed that 3 or 4 trackback spams had gotten through SpamKarma2, all from an IP in the UAE. I went to the SpamKarma2 page and found that as well as the 3 or 4 that had gotten through, there were also a few hundred that hadn’t gotten through. I took care of that, and was reading the rest of my email when 3 more got through SpamKarma2. All still from this IP in the UAE. Ok, this calls for bigger guns than SK2. I went to the terminal window that was tailing my logs from the colo box, all ready to “iptables” this IP out of my hair, when suddenly my terminal window stopped responding. So did my other terminal window on the dom0 of the colo box. So did all my web sites. So did my mailing lists.

I went off to work wondering if this was just a DDOS and it would come back up when they got bored of me, or if the box was truly locked up and would need a power cycle. If it was locked, I was seriously considering throwing in the towel on colo, because obviously I can’t keep the sort of uptime I demand. Even Linode was better than this, and they were getting hit by DDOSes all the time. The only thing I didn’t like about the Linode was the piss-poor amount of memory I got – 128Mb versus the 1000Mb I have on my domU.

On my way to work, I got an email from Vicki saying my blog was back up, and at the next traffic light I was able to verify that some of my other web sites were still running. Looks like I weathered the storm.

Photoshop is hogging my disk! Help!

Yesterday I was editing a gigantic Photoshop file (100,000 pixels by 2500 pixels) that I’d put 48 shots from my 8 megapixel camera into, by opening the shots 10-20 at a time, going into each one and doing a select all (splat A) and copy (splat C), closing the file in question, then going into the big file and doing a paste (splat V). Along the way I’d saved the big file a few times. Along the way I’d also done some experimenting with cropping the small jpegs, and the big file, although I’d ended up rolling back all the changes.

This morning I decided I needed to crop some files and overlay them on the big file. First thing I did was flatten the existing 48 layers on the big file. Then I opened up 10 of the jpegs, just as I had before. But when I attempted to crop one of the jpegs, I got a message that I was out of swap space. Actually, I got two popup messages. The first looks like an OS message:


Your startup disk is almost full.
You need to make more space available on your
startup disk by deleting files.
[ ] Do not warn me about this disk again

The second came from Photoshop:


Adobe Photoshop
Could not complete your request
because the scratch disks are full.

At this point, I tried a bunch of things. I exited Photoshop, I rebooted, and I started up Photoshop. I opened only one jpeg. I verified that Photoshop said that the file took up 21 megabytes in memory and there were 30+gigabytes of disk space free. Then I tried the crop tool. And I got the same popups. Before I dismissed them, sure enough “df” and “Activity Monitor” both verified that all 30+ gigabytes of disk were gone. Other tests with other files have given exactly the same results. Even if I resize the file to half the size (and it says it’s only taking up 6 megabytes in memory) it still consumes all the memory when I attempt to crop it.

Can anybody tell me what would make Photoshop suddenly change so that cropping a file should cause it to use over 1000 times as much disk space as the size of the original file?