How Chrome ate 21GB of storage • Hacker News Board

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#21

Post by DannyBee » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

aikah wrote: post #15

ameliaquining wrote: post #8

I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)

> I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. What do you mean ? if I download Chrome from the official website I get a third party installer ? because I have the exact same problem with that very official installer.

He means that bug report is about a third party installer screwing up the permissions and nothing changing it?

Can you point me to an official installer with the same problem?

I'm not aware of those installers installing anything as root.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#22

Post by cmdrfred » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:46 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #16

jeffmcjunkin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is prior versions of Chrome taking up disk space, not memory. That's a completely separate issue.

Fortunately disk space, unlike memory, is infinite.

I'd much rather you use 21GB on my SSD than 2.1GB of my ram.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#23

Post by witty_username » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #16

jeffmcjunkin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is prior versions of Chrome taking up disk space, not memory. That's a completely separate issue.

Fortunately disk space, unlike memory, is infinite.

21 GB is about 2% of a 1 TB drive. Not that ridiculous.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#24

Post by taeric » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #20

Zekio wrote: post #2

This just seems like something that should've been fixed years ago

It was (in fact, it's not clear it was ever broken) That's why if you look at the linked bug report, the only reports are of people who have used third party installers as root that screw up the permissions. The bug report is basically "when i screw this up, chrome doesn't notice and fix it for me".

I'm not at all sure how this excuses things. If there is a known state that can be reached by the browser, then either a) indicate why it cannot be fixed and give tips for the users or b) put in the code to fix it for the users.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#25

Post by loeg » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

cmdrfred wrote: post #22

tedunangst wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately disk space, unlike memory, is infinite.

I'd much rather you use 21GB on my SSD than 2.1GB of my ram.

Hm. On some machines I only have 8x the SSD as RAM. I might take the 2.1GB to 21GB trade in that case :-).

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#26

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

rocky1138 wrote: post #5

Does this only occur on Macs?

I'm almost certain I had a similar problem on Windows, though it was a few months, maybe a year ago.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#27

Post by lucb1e » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

> I’m happily walking away from this with an extra 21GB in my pocket! And now I ask you: is your Chrome bigger than mine?

Given I don't have to rely on third party updaters, I doubt it. Let's see...

    $ let size=0; dpkg -L chromium | while read path; do if [ -f "$path" ]; then let size=$size+$(du -sb "$path" | awk '{print $1}'); echo $size bytes, $(($size/1024/1024)) megabytes; fi; done;
    172060669 bytes, 164 megabytes
    $ du -sh .{cache,config}/chromium
    8.4M  .cache/chromium
    25M	  .config/chromium

So the cache is 8M, config files 25M and program files 164M (listed by dpkg -L, then some command line magic to add up file sizes). A grand total of just under 200MB.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#28

Post by esaym » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 6:04 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #27

> I’m happily walking away from this with an extra 21GB in my pocket! And now I ask you: is your Chrome bigger than mine? Given I don't have to rely on third party updaters, I doubt it. Let's see... $ let size=0; dpkg -L chromium | while read path; do if [ -f "$path" ]; then let size=$size+$(du -sb "$path" | awk '{print $1}'); echo $size bytes, $(($size/1024/1024)) megabytes; fi; done; 172060669 bytes, 164 megabytes…

heh, nice

    user@t61:~$ let size=0; dpkg -L chromium | while read path; do if [ -f "$path" ]; then let size=$size+$(du -sb "$path" | awk '{print $1}'); echo $size bytes, $(($size/1024/1024)) megabytes; fi; done;
    162190110 bytes, 154 megabytes
    user@t61:~$ du -sh .{cache,config}/chromium
    386M    .cache/chromium
    84M     .config/chromium

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#29

Post by danudey » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #16

jeffmcjunkin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is prior versions of Chrome taking up disk space, not memory. That's a completely separate issue.

Fortunately disk space, unlike memory, is infinite.

A lot of our lapops at work (the majority, in fact) have ~240GB SSDs, so that's about 10% of their disks. Not insignificant.

Re: How Chrome ate 21GB of storage

#30

Post by JohnTHaller » Sat, Sep 17, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

ameliaquining wrote: post #8

I feel like it's slightly dishonest not to mention that (according to the Chrome devs) this problem is caused by poorly-behaved modifications to the Chrome installer made by third-party redistributors, and not by Chrome itself. (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Chrome.)

I've seen the official Opera installer for Windows exhibit this same behavior.