DataCache.db - growing extremely fast

de-served commented 5 months ago

Describe the bug

Decided to run Ultimate Defrag for HDD volume trying to fix very strange accessing files lags (tested read speeds - all is ok...) Started defrag and run resources monitor to look at disk activity/speeds/times and found that there are lot of writes to %LocalAppData%\OpenShell\DataCache.db - there was too high writes speed and activity. System drive is M2 SSD, so I exited OpenShell to stop this. Then I went to this file and found it is huge - ~0.8 Gb. Windows installation is "2.5 weeks old". Two days ago I've enabled Parameters>Privacy>Common>Track programs runs for Start & Search. Only for remembering what I will start from Win-R, not more. For that two days I've restarted PC ~10 times, there are 15 programs in autorun, and I've started manually about 15 to 20 programs more. Now I just went to this file and start resources monitor and found that this file written again (with sorting by write speed - it was the N1 with >200Mb/s for a few seconds).

So there is a three big questions:

why this file is so huge;
what stores here really and why if windows "tracking" do most if not all of the work;
how to disable (and delete of course) using this file/database? I don't need such huge file with a lot of writes activity.

There are no tag "question" so posted it as "Bug" (seems like this file can't be soooooo huge).

Area of issue

Start menu

To reproduce

All in the description part.

Expected behavior

No response

Open-Shell version

4.4.191

Windows version

Win10 x64 22H2 10.0.19045.3803

Additional context

No response

ge0rdi commented 5 months ago

There are no tag "question" so posted it as "Bug" (seems like this file can't be soooooo huge).

There is Discussions section that should be used in first place if someone has questions like this.

ge0rdi commented 5 months ago

why this file is so huge

Hard to tell. 800MB is really way too much for the file. Mine has like under 2MB. You can clear the file using Open-Shell Menu settings -> Backup -> Clear cached information. Then check if its size is raising again.

what stores here really and why if windows "tracking" do most if not all of the work;

It contains various information (including icons) that Open-Shell parsed from Start menu items. This is to make Start menu displaying faster (there is no need to obtain all the information again for things that didn't change).

how to disable (and delete of course) using this file/database?

It is not possible to disable it (at least I don't see a way how).

de-served commented 5 months ago

After my post I've tried to find by myself what's happening - first I've deleted this .db and it was recreated in a minute with the same size... Then I re-read every settings tab/option trying to understand what can cause this and disabled "Pre-cache icons". Then deleted this .db, restarted machine and now, 3 hours later, I see this file is 1.6Mb. Will watch for it.

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