Alt Text

A 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

  • neonred@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    40
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    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.

    • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      11 months ago

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

      • neonred@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        11 months ago

        Like I said it’s a cheap solution for a single user system. Ofc tmpfs would be better but has to be done for every user again

        • glibg10b@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          11 months ago

          You: It’s a single user system
          Also you: Tmpfs would have to be done for every user

          And a /tmp/ symlink would have to be created for every user too, so I don’t get your point

          Tmpfs is just as easy as making a symlink, but without the filename conflicts between files in ~/.config/ and /tmp/. You just need to add a line to /etc/fstab

          • tslnox@reddthat.com
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            /usr/local/sbin/adduser.local

            One line in there and you can make it add a new line with appropriate /home/userX/.cache tmpfs line to fstab.

            Or, maybe a cleaner way, you might make a init/systemd service that, when booting, would run something like

            for each dir in /home do
            mount dir/.tmp -type tmpfs
            done

            I’m not at the computer now and I’m lazy to Google it, so this above is just a pseudo code and probably won’t run.

            • glibg10b@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              11 months ago

              Neat, thanks for sharing

              Here’s the above pseudocode in bash:

              find /home/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec mount none {}/.cache/ -t tmpfs -o size=16G \;
              

              for doesn’t work here because it uses spaces to delimit strings, which could cause issues with filenames that contain spaces

              You can also create a systemd user service, which is useful if you don’t have root access. The above mount command requires root, but the following doesn’t and is more robust than symlinking to /tmp/:

              ln -s $(mktemp -dp /var/tmp/) ~/.config/