Windows - a moan about deleting Julia

Offtopic
,
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On Windows 10 my .julia folder has over 18Gbytes of space used.
There are hundreds of thousands of files under .julia Running Pkg.gc has no effect on the number of files.
I decided to uninstall Julia (I use juliaup) then delete the .julia directory

MOAN - Windows runs a graphical file browser which displays endless useless information about deleted files. I am emptying my Recycle Bin and it is deleting 180 files per second - why oh why can it just not delete lots of files quickly?

One other small thing - should there be a remove / uninstall method in juliaup ?

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I nearly always use Shift-Del for file and folder deletion.
The RecycleBin stays empty and clean always :wink: which I like.

Well, the deletion process still has the graphical visuals but its not a major time issue for me (ssd?) even for much larger data. This depends on hardware and file system.

(A proper backup strategy is always obligatory!!! Not only because deleting with shift-del in this case.)

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Windows command line: “Removes (deletes) a directory.” rd /s /q

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FWIW, on linux / macos there is juliaup self uninstall.

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That is the source of this issue

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That seems slightly excessive. You can find tools like this which report where the space is spent. This would probably be interesting for others as well.

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Not difficult to guess where space is spent. I referred to it before, the artifacts come with an excessive bloat of needless files (headers, (large) static libs, etc).

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But there might be certain packages which exhibit this behavior and could be optimized?

Just for reference: my .julia contains around 1 GB of data.

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All?

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Sorry, I only looked into .julia.packages, .julia is around 10 GB for me, too.

Worst offenders here: conda with 3 GB, compiled with 2.2 GB, MKL’s in artifacts (around 600 MB for each version) followed by Enzyme in artifacts (around 300 MB for each version) followed by Mosek in packages (around 200 MB).

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Is this after ] gc --all?

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Linking related thread on Julia and Pkg clean up.

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I just did gc --all and this reduced the load by around 500 MB.

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This isn’t related to OP.
This is about Windows and deleting large folders with many files and a not helpful visualization of this deletion process. That’s why we are in Offtopic.

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I thought one of the reasons OP decided to remove Julia was (quote):

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Seems so and

.julia can grow large, and if you are very active it will stay large even after gc.
I don’t think this is a problem, it’s just a sign of quite some number of great packages.

Removing .julia completely and creating it new from scratch is a viable option if you want to make free space. You even don’t need to reinstall Julia itself. Just run Julia after deletion and .julia will be created new and clean.
(You have to be careful for ./dev folder, you may loose development changes)

So far so good.

Deleting a large folder with many files can be a pain in Windows (and e.g. on a NFS mounted file system).

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Fyi, the suggested large Windows folder deletion method given here, is simple and seems to further optimize @Jeff_Emanuel’s recommendation above.

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