Wish List - Wish List: Wish #39

<Member picture

0 Dislike

Mark Lundstrom

List amount of user storage

I an see on my “My nanoHUB” page that that I using 5% of my allotted storage, but it would also be nice to know how many GB that is.

Comments (5)

  1. Michael McLennan

    I’d like to see “1GB” on the right-hand side of the storage bar. Then, if I wanted more space, I could click on the “manage” link, and perhaps request more storage.

    It might be good too if the storage bar turned red above a certain amount, say 80%.

    Reply Report abuse

    Please login to comment.

  2. Michael McLennan

    Some people worry that this could be abused, but we’re only offering 1GB (before you have to pay points), and there are other internet sites that offer better than that for free. I think it’s unlikely that it will be abused.

    Reply Report abuse

    Please login to comment.

  3. Gerhard Klimeck

    My concerns are of the nature of the failure mode if someone does run out of disk space. How many people have run out of space? Do we know? How many people have cleaned up their disk space? Are they being alerted if they run out of disk space that no new runs can start etc?

    Reply Report abuse

    Please login to comment.

  4. George B. Adams III

    I second Michael’s and Gerhard’s comments.

    Reply Report abuse

    Please login to comment.

  5. Robin Whittle

    There’s no direct indication of the storage capacity, however if I click the Manage button, I get a directory listing which I can navigate by clicking. Each directory currently listed, or each file, has a size in MB or GB. This is helpful information, since my WinXP File Manager WebDAV interface doesn’t report how many bytes are used in directories. Likewise the Firefox use of the WebDAV (https://nanohub.org/webdav/) URLs. From this it looks as if I currently have about 2.85GB in my system, and my “MyHub” page indicates my storage is both “100%” and “You are currently exceeding your storage limit”.

    However, this limit was reached when a Meep (PhotonicsTK tool) crashed, presumably due to shortage of storage space. (I was attempting to run one of the examples, without any changes, and it took about 4.5 hours on 8 processors for the “Total field” simulation run. The results can’t be used, because they are incomplete.)

    What is my storage limit? I don’t know – there’s no obvious documentation or indication of it. I need to have some idea of what it is at present, and about what limit (potentially beyond “100%”) causes simulation runs to stop. I haven’t found any documentation on this, or on how the NanoHub system creates various files and directories for the sessions I run. How are we supposed to manage this highly technical business of creating and storing large quantities of data without documentation?

    I can find out by experimentation. I tried deleting the files which make up most of this data, which were in https://nanoHUB.org/webdav/data/sessions/nnnnnnL/pppp where nnnnnn is the session number and pppp is the name I gave his simulation project.

    The MyHub Storage Management facility is not much use for this, since it only enables single files to be deleted, or whole directories. There’s 76 files, with sizes up to 94MB there. I used the WinXP WebDAV interface to select bunches of them for deletion.

    I deleted 12 94MB files and used the Storage Management page to list the nnnnnnL directory. This showed that the pppp directory now had 1.68GB in it. In a separate browser window, I refreshed the MyHub page and the indication was still the same: “100%” and “You are currently exceeding your storage limit”.

    I deleted 20 52.4MB files. Now, according to the total of the first level directory capacities in the “Storage Management” page, there was about 733MB in my system. Refreshing the MyHub page . . . “75%”.

    From this I conclude that I have a 1GB limit and that, at least in this instance, the system which runs Meep spat the dummy (Aussie term for losing the plot, blurting out the pacifier in disgust etc.) when the storage got close to 3 times that.

    So why isn’t this documented somewhere? Instead we have a flashy Web2.0 site with polls, “knowledge bases”, thumbs up and thumbs down votes etc. etc. but apparently no documentation.

    I asked a question https://nanohub.org/answers/question/741 and can apparently earn “23 points” for “closing it”. But why does anyone in this professional environment need points? Maybe this stuff would make sense for motivationally challenged teenagers, but this site is for professionals or professionals in training.

    There’s a whole complex administrative regime for these points and their “market value”, monthly royalty points as detailed in the question page and further at: https://nanohub.org/kb/points/earning_points_in_the_questions__answers_forum

    According to http://nanohub.org/legal/terms “You may request an increase in system quotas, and you may use points to pay for premium services”.

    So I used Google to find out about these premium services. Does this include more storage? No: http://nanohub.org/store indicates the sum total of the premium services seems to be a choice of T-shirts, for “$500” each, which I assume means “500 points”.


    BTW, I wrote this in separate paragraphs and pasted it into this tiny composition window on this page. If it appears as one long paragraph, then this is the fault of the NanoHub system. Web forum software typically chews more than one space in succession and sometimes newlines, thereby making it impossible for people to communicate with the formatting they intend. – Robin

    Reply Report abuse

    Please login to comment.