Media folder growing because of the RSS Ticker Files

Hello.
I noticed that the media folder is growing a lot lately.
when checking I found several files like this:
“ticker_25ed31a9274c22ab6b62792fcd3d4306”

They have no extension, some have more than 7MB.

01 - What exactly are these files?

02 - Will they increase infinitely?

03 - Is it possible to delete or do something that reduces these files?

Thank you.

They’re images embedded in tickers that you’re using in the CMS.

They will be deleted when they’re no longer required. There were some bugs around this though in older versions, so if you’re not already on 1.8.9 then I’d suggest you upgrade to avoid those.

You also need to ensure XTR is running properly otherwise nothing will clean those up and they will continue to grow indefinitely. If you’re using Docker, XTR is setup and configured for you already. If you did a custom install, you need to arrange that it’s run regularly yourself.

https://xibo.org.uk/manual/en/install_xtr.html

Hello, first of all, thanks for the help.

I’m using version 1.8.9.
Manual Installation.

Sorry, the link you gave me is very technical, I did not understand correctly what he says to do.

Is it possible to configure the XTR in the CMS, or can it only be done on the server?

With manual instillation on a web server it needs to be configured as per the manual page Alex has linked.
Which pretty much means you need to have a task like cron / windows scheduled task that will run the xtr.php.

XTR will then run all CMS tasks ie maintenance tasks, fetch remote DataSet, emails notification etc.

On Docker installations that’s all configured and running without the need for any manual configuration changes.

It seems that I found in my hosting a place to configure cron.

That’s it?

What data should I add there?

I’m afraid of making a mistake. can you help me?

I can’t tell you exactly what to put there because I don’t know how your server is setup.

Broadly, you need to run as frequently as possible

/path/to/php /path/to/xibo/bin/xtr.php

as shown in the article I linked you to, where /path/to/php is the path to your PHP command line executable, and /path/to/xibo is the fully qualified path to your Xibo CMS install.

Xibo is really not suitable for shared hosting. If you have web in the URL you’re using to access the CMS then you’re going to keep hitting issues with the install. To avoid that, you need to make changes to the webserver configuration that you can’t normally make on shared hosting environments.

Okay, thanks for the instructions.

Unfortunately for now I can only use xibo this way, but I’ll start to study a way to deploy to a dedicated server soon.

01 - So if I look for the support of the hosting and ask to guide me on how to program the execution of this file “/ path / to / php /path/to/xibo/bin/xtr.php” Unnecessary Ticker RSS files will be deleted right?

02 - How often do you suggest scheduling the execution?

03 - In the server’s instructions, there is an address for each version of PHP.
I’m using “5.6” Should I use this? or should I use a specific version for the XTR.PHP file?

My code looks like this:

Blockquote
/opt/php56/bin/php /home/mucur615/public_html/xb/bin/xtr.php

I set up the task to run every 5 minutes for a quick test.
“Is the period too short?”

I noticed that the files have gone down, but the MEDIA folder still remains a bit large.

When I look in cms at:
“xibo / stats / library / view”

Data for the modules were at 656, and decreased to 331.
“Decreased 325mb”

But when I check the size of the media folder on the hosting I see that it has decreased from 843 to 838.
that is, only “5mb”

Some file was deleted, but apparently it was not the files that are in the media folder, because it is still large.

Can I have done something wrong?

01 - NOTE: In settings> Maintenance> Enable Maintenance> “OFF” was set.

I switched to ON, waited the 5 minutes of programming, but it continued the same way. no more space was released.

What is the function of this option? Should I leave it ON or OFF?

02 - I also tried to manually execute all the options contained in:
Administration> Maintenance.
But also no extra space was released.

Every 5 minutes is fine.

The system can’t release files that are in use somewhere.

This directly correlates to your questions about database. All your usage sounds fairly minimal to me from your description. If you’re trying to run Xibo on shared hosting, then you’re fighting a battle you won’t win. It doesn’t work well there, and most shared hosting providers will start to complain about the load it puts on the server fairly quickly. Switch to something supportable please!

Our recommendation is an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64 bit VPS with DigitalOcean or Vultr, and then running the CMS inside Docker. We have a complete end to end guide on installation.

Analyzing the “media” folder I noticed that there are “ticker_654 …” files with more than 4 months.

They are very old news files, which are only taking up space.

As I understand it, the ticker is accumulating new news without erasing the old ones.

Is it possible to set the news display to 1 or 2 months only, so that the old ones and their files are deleted?

This will prevent old news from being displayed and at the same time free up disk space!

Hey, Alex.
I believe this solves part of the problem,

Also think about limiting the age or quantity of the news, to prevent old news from being displayed, as well as the accumulation of old files.

Old items which are no longer going to be shown are removed automatically assuming you are running XTR.

In terms of quantity, only what is needed is downloaded, so you directly determine that. If you have an RSS feed with 100 items in it and you only want to show 1, then limit the Ticker widget to 1 item!

Compression is an interesting idea and we will consider it, however, it doesn’t fit all use cases, and in many cases the images in ticker feeds are very small to start with so it wouldn’t be sensible to further compress those.

Hello.
Thanks for the feedback.

01 - I configured the CRON task to run xtr.php every 5 minutes as previously reported.

But even then items over 4 months have not yet been deleted, while this new items are added daily:

Erro%20Xibo%2002%20arquivos%20antigos

02 - About I determine the amount of items to be downloaded, I could not find any option that allows this configuration.

This is the RSS Ticker Module configuration screen:
As you can see, there is no option here to limit the quantity to be displayed:

In the ticker settings in the layout:
Here’s how the General tab is:

In this example I am using the news from this address:
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/brasil/

I have created several layouts, each with a widget that contains a different news category, and I interleave between them.
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/carros/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/ciencia-e-saude/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/ciencia-e-saude/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/economia/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/educacao/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/concursos-e-emprego/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/espirito-santo/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/mundo/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/musica/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/natureza/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/politica/mensalao/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/pop-arte/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/turismo-e-viagem/
http://pox.globo.com/rss/g1/tecnologia/

Here you can see the Format tab:
Note: Each widget layout has a duration of 10 seconds and displays only one news item at a time.

In Quantity I set “1”, and I selected Randomise.
Thus, each time the layout is displayed, a new random news is displayed.

If I disable Randomise, the last news will always be displayed, and no other and I do not want this, I need to display new news with each loop, but I would limit the amount of different news, for example: only the last 10, but this option does not exist.

And this is the Advanced tab:

03 - By End, About Compaction.
In the code I created, it checks the image size, and only reduces those that are larger than 800px wide.
and compression is done on all, but can also be modified to see if it needs to be compacted.

Anyway, I’m happy to be helping.

But I want to reaffirm the need to define a way to limit the amount of news to be downloaded.
In my tests this is not happening.
I’m in version 1.8.9.

A great week.

If you’re telling it to show 1 random item, then by definition it has to download all the items in that feed.

If the feed keeps old items in it for a long time then you will have very old items associated with those widgets in the library, because you’ve selected to be able to show any random one of those items.

The system is doing exactly what you’ve configured it to do.

Now it’s clear to me, the increase in file size is due to the Ramdon option.

In the widget configuration screens this information is not available.

However, would not it be nice to have the option to limit the amount of items downloaded when the Randon option is activated?

For example, only the last 10 items or 20 items. etc.?

Hello

I improved the code that compacts the images to look for bigger ones, and with great resolutions first.

my media folder that had 4gb now has 400mb

See the new code.