Monster Cookies
February 2, 2025 10:28 AM Subscribe
I recently discovered that my Google Chrome installation is using a whopping 78 GB (!) of local storage thanks to a new cookie/data caching policy. Is this happening to you too, and what's the best way to remedy it?
I've been experiencing issues with Slack (broken search bar, desynced updates, UI glitches), and went to clear cookies to try fixing it. That's when I saw the jaw-dropping data storage number, and I went through the list of websites by data stored (chrome://settings/content/all) to find the culprit. Turns out it was... all of them. Apparently Chrome added a feature where cookies and cached data for popular services is "partitioned" per-website rather than shared. Now 100+ MB-size caches for platforms like YouTube and Spotify are being duplicated across hundreds of sites, even ones visited only once, filling dozens of gigabytes of space with redundant data.
I could just clear all cookies and data, but then I'd have to re-log in to all my shit, and the problem would eventually recur. Is there a more efficient way to clear this data by source, to take out the most duplicated ones instead of doing them site by site? And how do I stop it from happening again? Can this feature be turned off without significant security risks?
I've been experiencing issues with Slack (broken search bar, desynced updates, UI glitches), and went to clear cookies to try fixing it. That's when I saw the jaw-dropping data storage number, and I went through the list of websites by data stored (chrome://settings/content/all) to find the culprit. Turns out it was... all of them. Apparently Chrome added a feature where cookies and cached data for popular services is "partitioned" per-website rather than shared. Now 100+ MB-size caches for platforms like YouTube and Spotify are being duplicated across hundreds of sites, even ones visited only once, filling dozens of gigabytes of space with redundant data.
I could just clear all cookies and data, but then I'd have to re-log in to all my shit, and the problem would eventually recur. Is there a more efficient way to clear this data by source, to take out the most duplicated ones instead of doing them site by site? And how do I stop it from happening again? Can this feature be turned off without significant security risks?
The mods may say this isn't an answer, but I haven't used Chrome in many years. So just as an experiment you might want to try Brave and Firefox. I have had problems with some Web sites refusing to open in Windows 11 Firefox (and then I use Brave). Also, when opening a lot of sites in Firefox Ubuntu I have sometimes run out of disk space since individual tabs (appear to be) virtualized, thus exceeding the total space allocated to the Linux root file system. Granted, you are on Windows 11. Ignore this if irrelevant.
posted by forthright at 11:02 AM on February 2
posted by forthright at 11:02 AM on February 2
Response by poster: forthright, I think Firefox has a similar partitioning policy (Google may have even borrowed it from them).
On closer inspection, it looks like the vast majority of space is being taken by cached data, not cookies, so for a short-term solution I guess it's a matter of figuring out a way to mass delete local storage for sites without impacting cookies. I'm not seeing an easy way to do that right away, though there might be some CCCleaner-type extension to automate it.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:14 PM on February 2
On closer inspection, it looks like the vast majority of space is being taken by cached data, not cookies, so for a short-term solution I guess it's a matter of figuring out a way to mass delete local storage for sites without impacting cookies. I'm not seeing an easy way to do that right away, though there might be some CCCleaner-type extension to automate it.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:14 PM on February 2
As far as I know most browsers can be configured to delete the cache when closing the browser.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:29 PM on February 2 [3 favorites]
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:29 PM on February 2 [3 favorites]
I see the same thing, hundreds of websites storing ~41Mb of cruft. Chrome will "limit" the total local storage to 80% of your disk space, but it doesn't seem to provide a way to adjust that amount. It would involve some messing about with hard drives and command prompts but you could potentially quarantine it to a separate partition.
A note for anyone else reading this tempted to clear their whole cache: don't forget to export a save for any idle games you're playing !
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posted by lucidium at 3:33 AM on February 3
A note for anyone else reading this tempted to clear their whole cache: don't forget to export a save for any idle games you're playing !
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posted by lucidium at 3:33 AM on February 3
Response by poster: Took another look at this -- what I ended up doing was:
- disable cookie partitioning (did this a few weeks ago; doesn't seem to be an option in Chrome flags any more, so I guess this "helpful" feature has already been deprecated?)
- open the long list of stored site data and sort by size (chrome://settings/content/all)
- hit the garbage can button to delete the site if it wasn't important, or expand and delete the YouTube cookie (or, further down, the Spotify/Twitch/etc. cookies) if I wanted to keep its other data. Since most of the sites with these cookies lacked other important cache data and clustered around the same size, I got into an easy rhythm of "click garbage can button --> hit Enter to confirm", keeping an eye out for domains I wanted to keep.
This did take longer than clearing all cookies, but avoided losing logins and other important data. It also took less time than I thought -- for one thing, each deletion of a YouTube cookie seemed to reduce the size of all remaining YouTube cookies, so the space was freed up faster. Also, only the top few dozen sites had such cookies; most of the remaining hundreds were under a megabyte and only contained data related to those sites. And now my HDD is ~75GB lighter!
posted by Rhaomi at 7:19 PM on February 28
- disable cookie partitioning (did this a few weeks ago; doesn't seem to be an option in Chrome flags any more, so I guess this "helpful" feature has already been deprecated?)
- open the long list of stored site data and sort by size (chrome://settings/content/all)
- hit the garbage can button to delete the site if it wasn't important, or expand and delete the YouTube cookie (or, further down, the Spotify/Twitch/etc. cookies) if I wanted to keep its other data. Since most of the sites with these cookies lacked other important cache data and clustered around the same size, I got into an easy rhythm of "click garbage can button --> hit Enter to confirm", keeping an eye out for domains I wanted to keep.
This did take longer than clearing all cookies, but avoided losing logins and other important data. It also took less time than I thought -- for one thing, each deletion of a YouTube cookie seemed to reduce the size of all remaining YouTube cookies, so the space was freed up faster. Also, only the top few dozen sites had such cookies; most of the remaining hundreds were under a megabyte and only contained data related to those sites. And now my HDD is ~75GB lighter!
posted by Rhaomi at 7:19 PM on February 28
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I don't know how to stop youtube.com from doing that, but it might be good info for someone else who does...
posted by cgg at 10:39 AM on February 2 [1 favorite]