16 GB large .julia/registries/General folder

General Usage
1

I have had julia installed for maybe two years now, and realised the .julia folder has grown quite big, around 25 GB. I didn’t think too much about it since I have a lot of packages installed and I also run some python and know how much a tensorflow installation can take.

Recently though I did a more thorough analysis of my home folder and noticed that of those 25 GBs in .julia it was 16 in the registries/General folder, and 15 of those came from the registries/General/.git folder.

I deleted the folder and ran an pkg> up to make it re-download it and now it is a reasonable size (119MB) again. It also seems like now it is not a cloned repo, but just a folder since it is missing the .git subfolder.

I’m not sure if this is just something that went wrong on my system or if there is some underlying issue that might be filling up julia users home folders over time for no good reason?

Thought I would put it up here in case more people had the same problem. An easy way to check the size on a normal linux installation could be to run

du -sh ~/.julia/registries/General

and see if it is multiple GBs in size.

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2

I would guess at some point in the past you cloned the registry in git and you’ve been tracking all the changes over the last few years.

Julia 1.7 has a different method of handling the Registry. I suggest once you upgrade to 1.7 series do a ] registry rm General followed by registry add General

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3

Yeah, I was trying to remember if I ever did anything with the registries cause it seemed a bit weird that it would track it. I can’t remember doing it and can’t understand why I would have manually cloned it, but that might be the more plausible explanation.

I thought maybe that an older version of the package manager cloned it for some reason and this behavior was changed in the newer ones.

4

You may also try

pkg> gc

To remove versions that are no longer required.

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5

I had a similar problem with my artifacts folder, but my registry folder is not too large (under 0.5 GB).