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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Zangoose@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

Alt TextA screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system

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[-] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 167 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You don't have to clean your ~/.cache every now and then. You have to figure out which program eats so much space there, ensure that it is not misconfigured and file a bugreport.

[-] redd@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 11 months ago

So OP's headline should be saying instead: Reminder to CHECK your ~/.cache folder every now and then

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 11 months ago

just symlink ~/.cache to /dev/null

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[-] nick@midwest.social 83 points 11 months ago

That’s not very cache money of you

[-] ryannathans@aussie.zone 80 points 11 months ago

I did this and now my games have no icons in lutris, some of my gnome settings got reset and my proton email bridge stopped working

[-] sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de 51 points 11 months ago

So the apps are broken. Cache is meant to be deleted at any time

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[-] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 11 months ago

For some reason devs can't wrap their head around cache being temporary.

[-] Iapar@feddit.de 25 points 11 months ago

You shouldn't have done that Dave.

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[-] sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de 41 points 11 months ago

Even better: mount ~/.cache as ramfs. It will also speed up some apps significantly.

[-] redd@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 11 months ago

I always felt that there should be some user directory like /tmp/ which will be wiped regularly.

[-] glibg10b@lemmy.ml 10 points 11 months ago

/run/ contains such a directory

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[-] neonred@lemmy.world 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Because of excessive RAM I symlink ~/.cache to /tmp. Additionally installing zramswap helps for this scenario.

Benefits are faster access, automatc purging between reboots and no wear to the NMVe drive.

Yes, this is a single user scenario.

[-] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 11 points 11 months ago

Isn't most of what's in there just filters downloaded from the internet? Python packages, browser cache, etc? Your system confirms you to redownloading everything all the time, no?

[-] glibg10b@lemmy.ml 8 points 11 months ago

This seems like a filename conflict waiting to happen. Why not just mount a tmpfs there?

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[-] Secret300@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

Once I get more than 16GB of ram I'll definitely try that

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[-] SuperIce@lemmy.world 34 points 11 months ago

I don't think I've ever seen .cache get bigger than 10GB

[-] Zangoose@lemmy.world 29 points 11 months ago

It looks like yay was storing AUR build files there, that folder took up about 160 of the 164GiB

[-] SuperIce@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

You can use yay -Sc to clean the cache. It'll also ask you if you want to clean the pacman cache, which I'm assuming you also haven't cleaned (check the size of /var/cache/pacman).

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[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 23 points 11 months ago

Your Distro should normally do that for you.

Advising for this means people will delete random cache and download stuff always.

Are multiple files in there? If yes you could add a script that only deletes files of certain age.

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[-] dog_@lemmy.world 16 points 11 months ago

Question, could you have cron/crontab do it monthly or something? Do it monthly meaning delete everything in ~/.cache every month or so?

[-] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 41 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[-] BaroqueInMind@kbin.social 9 points 11 months ago

This is the good shit I miss from reddit. Thank you for posting a systemd service config, I'm going to implement this.

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[-] majestic@sh.itjust.works 16 points 11 months ago

No way. If i clean up my .cache directory my precious cached with sccache rust deps would be very upset. >:[

[-] noroute@lemmy.world 13 points 11 months ago

You can also setup a cron job to periodically clean oldest files for you.

Example: @weekly find ~/.cache -type f -mtime +7 -delete

This will delete everything older than 7 days inside your cache folder.

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[-] conorab@lemmy.conorab.com 12 points 11 months ago

Doesn’t Steam store the game library there?

[-] Zangoose@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago

No, .cache is similar to a temporary directory (or at least in theory) where important data isn't supposed to be stored there, instead only temporary files that might speed things up (e.g. images in a browser or thumbnails in a file manager). In this case it looks like all of my AUR packages had their source files cached, which added up over the ~1.75 years that I've been running this distro

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[-] CheesyFox@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago
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[-] vox@sopuli.xyz 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

seems like a bug in one of rhe programs you're using.
modt software automatically manages it's cache...
are you using build caching tools such as Mozilla sccache? These tend to create 20gb+ cache directories, especially if used with debug builds

[-] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

....yeah let me go check that...

13,574 totaling 1.7gb, not too bad. Hey OP how do you get to this view? It looks like we both use nautilus but when I select "properties" on the .cache folder it looks different.

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[-] therealjcdenton@lemmy.zip 7 points 11 months ago
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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
430 points (96.9% liked)

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