Disk usage on OS X for cache is ridiculously large

[adamreisnz]

Bug description

Yarn is using way too much cache

What is the current behavior?
By accident really, I found out that yarn was using more than 10GB of disk space on my computer for caches.

How on earth it even managed to accumulate 10GB worth of cached data is beyond me. I don't even think that if you add up the size of every single package that I ever installed + their dependencies and multiply it by 100 you'd get there.

What is the expected behavior?
For yarn to manage the cache better, purge old items from the cache, clean up after itself, and be a better guest on my machine in general. Put a limit on how much can be cached. 1GB should be plenty! And surely packages that were cached a year ago can be purged from cache as well.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Use yarn for a couple of years
2. Check your cache size

Environment

• Node Version: 12
• Yarn v1 Version: 1.21.0, but I've been using it since 0.x
• OS and version: OS X 10.14.6

[velipso]

I have to remove mine yearly... last year it hit 96GB (on a 250GB ssd), and this year it was 70GB. Fun times.

Also, I have to literally rm it, because yarn cache clean will crash V8.

If anyone is curious:

cd ~/Library/Caches/Yarn
rm -rf *

[velipso]

this is probably a symptom of #6037

[merceyz]

Closing as fixed in v2 where the cache uses compressed zip files

https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/migration

[adamreisnz]

10GB compressed as ZIP file is still going to be huge. Is there not better way of managing the cache and auto purging old cache files more frequently?

[merceyz]

That's fair, yes, but the amount of files is much smaller (1 file = 1 dependency) and the amount of dependencies you'll need to download to get to that is much higher. For example my current cache contains 18542 dependencies (and thus 18542 files) at 3.71GB.

If auto cleaning the cache is something you need in v2 make a feature request

[adamreisnz]

I already filed a ticket for the issue, it's this one. I don't think zipping is the answer here. But if you deem it solved and closed, then that's up to you and the Yarn team to decide.

[mariusbutuc]

FWIW, before yarn cache clean = 3.3 GB:

after yarn cache clean = all clean:

[shivaylamba]

@mariusbutuc what software did you use to display this graphical representation, looks really cool

[adamreisnz]

It's called daisy disk

[shivaylamba]

Thanks a lot!