Fixing yet another problem in Google Chrome

by Dmitry Kirsanov 10. June 2019 07:31

While digging into the problem with Chrome extension today, found that Chrome took around 700Mb of space for temporary files, which looked like CrashpadMetrics.pma~XXX.TMP. These files are 1Mb in size each, and there were literally over 700 of them.

Chrome creates these files to send to Google even if you disable this feature. Files aren’t sent, but created and never cleaned up.

I have a cleanup batch file on each computer, that executes every week, and it deals with drive(s) cleanup, synchronisation and stuff. I added this line:

ttl.exe "C:\Users\[my user name]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data" /subs /days:30 /mask:*.tmp

This uses my TTL application to delete files older than 30 days. I could simply write “del crash*.tmp”, but what if there is a temporary file that’s currently being written, or might be used. Hence the TTL and generous 30 days.

The first run freed 685Mb on system drive.