12 GB of dump files?

[Gaarysal]

<p>Tonight I noticed a large portion of available space on my SSD was used up so I investigated the cause and found 12 GB of dump files generated by EQ2 I initially thought these were created due to the sporadic crashes I've experienced recently but a friend of mine had a similar dump file created just tonight and did not experience any crashes or disconnects. The earliest dump file I had was from 7/3/12 and the earliest my friend had was 6/29/12.</p><p>Edit: the files are in C:Crash</p>

[alaplayer]

<p>Are the files you are referring to as 'dump' files in the logs directory, in a subdirectory of the server with your character name <strong>eq2log_CharName.txt,eq2log_CharName.2011.03.08.txt</strong> these are not dump files they are log files that you generally do not need, you need them if you are running a parser like ACT, but even then only the most current one.</p><p>It is perfectly safe to delete all files in this directory anytime you wish and it can be turned on and off in game by typing /log in the chat window, when you do it will tell you that logging has been turned on or off.</p>

[Gaarysal]

<p><cite>alaplayer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Are the files you are referring to as 'dump' files in the logs directory, in a subdirectory of the server with your character name <strong>eq2log_CharName.txt,eq2log_CharName.2011.03.08.txt</strong> these are not dump files they are log files that you generally do not need, you need them if you are running a parser like ACT, but even then only the most current one.</p><p>It is perfectly safe to delete all files in this directory anytime you wish and it can be turned on and off in game by typing /log in the chat window, when you do it will tell you that logging has been turned on or off.</p></blockquote><p>No they are .dmp files hence why I called them dump files and not text files. They are located in a folder called 'Crash' in the main C drive directory.</p>

[Oink]

<p>Thanks for the heads up, I've got these too...</p><p> Directory of C:Crash07/05/2012  02:13 AM     1,236,936,544 EverQuest2.exe_07052012_021258.dmp07/12/2012  12:35 AM     1,786,171,019 EverQuest2.exe_07122012_003545.dmp07/16/2012  09:26 PM     1,976,622,907 EverQuest2.exe_07162012_212611.dmp07/17/2012  03:07 AM     2,235,198,897 EverQuest2.exe_07172012_030729.dmp               4 File(s)  7,234,929,367 bytes</p><p>I'm going to have to symlink my C:Crash to my HD to avoid these unnecessary SSD writes until SOE disables this, since they'll never actually use these to fix their buggy code.</p>

[alaplayer]

<p><cite>Gaarysal@Permafrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>No they are .dmp files hence why I called them dump files and not text files. They are located in a folder called 'Crash' in the main C drive directory.</p></blockquote><p>All one needs to do is look as some of the wild posts here that people make about things they know nothing about and the rash, unreasonable assumptions they make about what is and what isn't. You provided no relevant information with your post, location of the files etc. Had you done that to start with I wouldn't have asked what I did.</p><p>I have this folder and it is empty, I have never deleted anything in it.</p>

[tkia]

Interesting. I just followed that path and discovered that I also have a folder with 3GB of junk in it. I'm guessing that it is something to do with wws_crashreport_uploader.exe which started asking for access through my firewall not too long ago. I keep saying no since I've seen no documentation from soe telling me what it is and why it keeps trying to access the internet. The requests don't even correlate with game crashes as far as I can see. And now it looks like we need an off switch for whatever it is. 12GB of junk dumped on a boot drive without any warning to the user is pretty unacceptable coding imo. And from the way it's dumping the files it could go on doing it indefinitely until it fills up the drive.

[Lamatu]

<p>This is very interesting as I have 4 .dmp files taking up almost 5 gigs. This is something new as these files are only from July 1-5 for me and have never been created before when the game has crashed.</p><p>I only keep 20 gigs free on my C: drive as the game and all non windows programs are on another partition.</p><p>Would be nice for a official response as for the change in the games behavior.</p>

[deadcrickets2]

<p><cite>alaplayer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Gaarysal@Permafrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>No they are .dmp files hence why I called them dump files and not text files. They are located in a folder called 'Crash' in the main C drive directory.</p></blockquote><p>All one needs to do is look as some of the wild posts here that people make about things they know nothing about and the rash, unreasonable assumptions they make about what is and what isn't. You provided no relevant information with your post, location of the files etc. Had you done that to start with I wouldn't have asked what I did.</p><p>I have this folder and it is empty, I have never deleted anything in it.</p></blockquote><p>They are actually memory dump files created by the game.    If you open eq2_default.ini you will find the line:</p><p>cl_log_crashes true</p><p>Whenever the game crashes it will create these dump files under C:Crash and then promptly upload them using wws_crashreport_uploader.exe.  If you have a limit on drive space or a limit on bandwidth you'll want to delete the files and block the uploader on your firewall.</p><p>I had mentioned this behaviour a few weeks before under General for others to know about.</p>

[deadcrickets2]

<p><cite>tkia wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>Interesting. I just followed that path and discovered that I also have a folder with 3GB of junk in it. I'm guessing that it is something to do with wws_crashreport_uploader.exe which started asking for access through my firewall not too long ago. I keep saying no since I've seen no documentation from soe telling me what it is and why it keeps trying to access the internet. The requests don't even correlate with game crashes as far as I can see. And now it looks like we need an off switch for whatever it is. 12GB of junk dumped on a boot drive without any warning to the user is pretty unacceptable coding imo. And from the way it's dumping the files it could go on doing it indefinitely until it fills up the drive. </blockquote><p>Correct it is related to that file.  Unfortunately there is no way to turn off the creation of the files.  The flag under eq2_default.ini resets itself every time the Launchpad is started.</p>

[tkia]

Well, any parameter that responds to a 'true' setting should have an equally valid 'false' one. And I dumped it in the eq2.ini to override the default settings. So, with that in all 3 of my installs we'll see if the crash folder I just deleted dares to come back.

[Gaarysal]

<p><cite>tkia wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>Well, any parameter that responds to a 'true' setting should have an equally valid 'false' one. And I dumped it in the eq2.ini to override the default settings. So, with that in all 3 of my installs we'll see if the crash folder I just deleted dares to come back. </blockquote><p>Apparently running the patcher will change false to true. Perhaps this is the bug? The patcher automatically patches this line to the true condition and prior to this bug the .ini defaulted to false?</p>

[tkia]

<p><cite>Gaarysal@Permafrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>tkia wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>Well, any parameter that responds to a 'true' setting should have an equally valid 'false' one. And I dumped it in the eq2.ini to override the default settings. So, with that in all 3 of my installs we'll see if the crash folder I just deleted dares to come back. </blockquote><p>Apparently running the patcher will change false to true. Perhaps this is the bug? The patcher automatically patches this line to the true condition and prior to this bug the .ini defaulted to false?</p></blockquote><p>If the patcher has started interfering with the <strong>eq2.ini</strong> I'm going to have some very harsh words with some platform coders.  The game does not update this file as it is the player's custom configuration file and method of overriding default settings. It doesn't even exist until a player decides to create it in order to store some changes.</p><p>The patcher will always update the <strong>eq2_default.ini</strong> as that is what it says on the box - a file full of DEFAULT settings.  Making changes in there is just a waste of time as they'll always be reverted back to default the next time you patch.</p><p>And none of my installations have reverted the changes I made to the <strong>eq2.ini</strong> despite all of them having been patched since the changes were made.</p>

[deadcrickets2]

<p><cite>tkia wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Gaarysal@Permafrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>tkia wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>Well, any parameter that responds to a 'true' setting should have an equally valid 'false' one. And I dumped it in the eq2.ini to override the default settings. So, with that in all 3 of my installs we'll see if the crash folder I just deleted dares to come back. </blockquote><p>Apparently running the patcher will change false to true. Perhaps this is the bug? The patcher automatically patches this line to the true condition and prior to this bug the .ini defaulted to false?</p></blockquote><p>If the patcher has started interfering with the <strong>eq2.ini</strong> I'm going to have some very harsh words with some platform coders.  The game does not update this file as it is the player's custom configuration file and method of overriding default settings. It doesn't even exist until a player decides to create it in order to store some changes.</p><p>The patcher will always update the <strong>eq2_default.ini</strong> as that is what it says on the box - a file full of DEFAULT settings.  Making changes in there is just a waste of time as they'll always be reverted back to default the next time you patch.</p><p>And none of my installations have reverted the changes I made to the <strong>eq2.ini</strong> despite all of them having been patched since the changes were made.</p></blockquote><p>Mine was reverting but that was after they introduced it.  I'll check to see if they made the change to ensure it doesn't revert as it's a very annoying "feature" that should only be enabled for troubleshooting purposes.</p>

[Daalilama]

<p>I dont know what the hect is going on but this pretty much bout tears it....for the last few weeks nearly every crash or lock up has resulted in the dmp file however this last I noticed my hd free space getting smaller and smaller even after deleting the dmp files I still would not recover nearly all the space used up...by my best estimates I've lost between 8-10 gigs of space on my hd into the black void known as eq2....not quite sure where the hect it went but sure would be nice if we actually get some offical response on this other than the standard lines of its always the users pc thats the problem.</p>

[deadcrickets2]

<p><cite>Daalilama@Nagafen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I dont know what the hect is going on but this pretty much bout tears it....for the last few weeks nearly every crash or lock up has resulted in the dmp file however this last I noticed my hd free space getting smaller and smaller even after deleting the dmp files I still would not recover nearly all the space used up...by my best estimates I've lost between 8-10 gigs of space on my hd into the black void known as eq2....not quite sure where the hect it went but sure would be nice if we actually get some offical response on this other than the standard lines of its always the users pc thats the problem.</p></blockquote><p>After deleting it you need to empty the trash can otherwise it's still taking up space.</p>

[kdmorse]

<p>This cheesed me off last night when the following happened:</p><ol><li>Known bug I crash on alot under certain circumstances.  (Related to a custom UI, only comes up when I'm scribing collectables by the 100's, which I was doing last night.</li><li>Crash after Crash after Crash, drive full.  </li><li>Due to full drive, settings files failed to write on exit, lost eq2*.ini, and my uisettings. They became 0 length files.</li><li>Had to restore from a backup.  </li></ol><p>I tried everything I could think of to turn them off, but even bypassing the launcher, it got reset to true every time and crash dumped.</p><p>Two things I'm going to try:</p><ul><li>Remove everyone's permissions to write to the C:Crash directory.</li><li>- or - </li><li>rmdir c:crash.  Create an empty file named C:Crash.  Should prevent a directory named c:crash from being created.</li></ul><p>grumble...</p>

[tkia]

<p>Well I've just checked and all 3 of my eq2.ini files still have this set to false. However I did notice that the crash folder is back, although there is nothing in it. That alone irritates me. How dare eq2 coders start creating junk folders all over my disk without referring to me? Especially at the top level of my boot filesystem. If they really must have it, there are much better places to dump it - like the various defined temp areas. At least in those places the files stand a chance of getting cleaned up periodically instead of just eating up all the hard drive space.</p><p>But at the end of the day this should be a debugging tool that you are instructed how to turn on when you actually need it, not a default setting eating space with no warning and causing problems like the ones documented above.</p>

[Daalilama]

<p><cite>deadcrickets2 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Daalilama@Nagafen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I dont know what the hect is going on but this pretty much bout tears it....for the last few weeks nearly every crash or lock up has resulted in the dmp file however this last I noticed my hd free space getting smaller and smaller even after deleting the dmp files I still would not recover nearly all the space used up...by my best estimates I've lost between 8-10 gigs of space on my hd into the black void known as eq2....not quite sure where the hect it went but sure would be nice if we actually get some offical response on this other than the standard lines of its always the users pc thats the problem.</p></blockquote><p>After deleting it you need to empty the trash can otherwise it's still taking up space.</p></blockquote><p>Yeah I did when I removed the dmp files so I'm not sure how I still lost space after cleaning this garbage out...with my hd not being a huge one every bit of lost space that I lost for no reason hurts...and the offical silence on this is comical.</p>

[Whilhelmina]

<p>Thanks for telling us about that...</p><p>I just found out I had a 16GB dump folder. I have memory leaks all the time on zoning, with a dump file every time...</p><p>I created a <span >C:Crash file, it seems to work. </span><span >"cl_log_crashes false" in eq2.ini didn't work.</span></p>

[rrr67212]

<p>Thanks for the heads up on this. I have all of you beat:</p><p>101 GB (108,460,571,857 bytes)</p>