Blame WorldWind

Happy Thanksgiving!

As I've written about before, I have basically given up on being a contributor to the World Wind .NET OpenSource project. I haven't really touched any WorldWind related code in months. But on my laptop where I kept all of my development files I left everything there for now, in case I do want to resume and make some contributions.

For the longest time I have had very odd behavior from this machine. Essentially on start up my system would grind to a halt, with my hard disk at near 100% utilization, for 10 minutes or more. This also happened when resuming Windows from sleep. All in all, very annoying. For a while I thought the problem might be antivirus related, maybe too much scanning on start up. So I switched from one anti-virus program to another, but the problem more or less continued. My computer is relatively new, it is Vista (64-bit) version, with sufficient memory and processor, the hard disk like most laptops isn't particularly fast, but my work laptop and my wife's laptop don't even experience behavior like mine.

Anyway, I was trying to solve this problem, a bit worried my system was compromised by malware. So I was performing some scans. I noticed that the scanners seemed to get hung up on a particular set of WorldWind debug log files created under my user folder. I knew WorldWind did generate a lot of debug logs when built and run in debug mode, and it didn't do a very good job of cleaning it up. I went and and took a look.

In C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\NASA\WorldWind\1.4.0.1\ there were 72,000 + log files seemingly created by DEBUG log messages. It also seemed that whatever was logging those, was rolling over that log after 1 or 2KB, meaning it would generate tons of very small individual files. I didn't realize the massive amount of these files, also the main WorldWind.log file was around 90MB, a known issue, we planned to do something about eventually.

After deleting these log files (I am never going to go back now to look at any of them), my computer feels reborn. It now starts up normally and doesn't crazily start disk I/O for the first 20 minutes after starting up. I mainly use the laptop now for watching Netflix movies as I've shifted development more to my Linux machine.

I can't seem to reproduce creating all those log files when I try restarting WorldWind executable in Debug mode now. If I have time this weekend maybe I'll try to make a fix for this and the other logging issue as a last World Wind hurrah.