Cache folder grows boundlessly

[GabeDeBacker]

Several users have reported that they are losing disk space due to the GVFS cache folder growing boundlessly.

In their scenarios, they create and delete clones of the Windows OS repository commonly. The issue is that the GVFS cache state of the deleted repositories remain forever causing disk space to be lost.

Suggestion would be to perform some type of garbage collection on the GVFS cache folder during boot, mount, etc.

[GabeDeBacker]

More information can be found here:
Bug 38724591: GVFS should have a mechanism to clean cache folder rather than grow boundlessly

[derrickstolee]

It is intentional that the cache folder does not remove any Git objects because they might be needed by the user. The objects are compacted by background maintenance at a regular interval, but that can only do so much as the repository grows in size.

One way to reduce the size of the repository is to delete the cache directory and run git fetch from your enlistment, which will download the necessary commits and trees again, starting from the smallest set of objects necessary for efficient Git commands. You would need to redownload any blob objects as necessary while working in the repository, so you would notice the repository being a bit slower until these objects catch up.

[GabeDeBacker]

The issue here is that users of GVFS have no real idea how the cache operates, so a mechanism where GVFS can do this something like this automatically (or at least inform the user somehow) is what the request is.