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
    40·
    1 year 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.caEnglish
      11·
      1 year 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
      7·
      1 year ago

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

      • neonred@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year 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
          2·
          1 year 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
            2·
            1 year 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
              3·
              1 year 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/