Clear Chocolatey Cache in Free Version – How To

cachechocolateywindows

Installation-file-cleaning is currently only available in the licensed edition of Chocolatey ($96 a year) and the developers seemingly have no plans to offer cache-cleaning support for the free version.

The package installation files can easily take gigabytes of storage space and to my knowledge they only increase in size as the user updates packages and installs new software, with only your hard drive capacity as the upper limit.

I don't know if Chocolatey stores cache in one central location — something is saved to ~\AppData\Local\Temp but the majority is located in the lib* folders in ~\ProgramData\chocolatey. Also the log files in the logs folder total to over 100 MB on my system. Is there any way to fully clear Chocolatey cache without manually deleting directories?

Best Answer

You may use for cleaning the cache the unofficial but approved package of choco-cleaner.

The installed package creates a Windows Scheduled Task to run Choco-Cleaner.ps1 every Sunday at 11:00 PM.

To install, run the following:

choco install choco-cleaner

To upgrade (unofficial) Choco Cleaner (Script + Task), run the following:

choco upgrade choco-cleaner

You may also manually run this task immediately in one of the following ways from the documentation:

Command Prompt:

\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\choco-cleaner\tools\Choco-Cleaner-manual.bat

PowerShell:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
\ProgramData\chocolatey\bin\Choco-Cleaner.ps1

Windows Start Menu: If you have choco-shortcuts-winconfig installed you'll find it with the rest of the Chocolatey Shortcuts.

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Windows – How to clear Windows File Cache

I'm not sure how much relevance this has to your question, but to answer your 2nd part, yes, hard-drives have their own internal hardware cache - usually 2, 8, 16, 32 or recently 64 megabytes.

Aside from that, Windows has a feature called Disk Write Caching which may help you. It can be enabled/disabled on a per-drive basis doing the following (directly copied from here):

Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
Click the Hardware tab.
Click Device Manager.
Click the plus sign (+) next to the Disk Drives branch to expand it.
Right-click the drive on which you want to enable or disable disk write caching, and then click Properties.
Click the Disk Properties tab.
Click to select or clear the Write Cache Enabled check box as appropriate.
Click OK.

DNS Cache – How Often Does DNS Cache Clear on Windows 7

The DNS cache doesn't ever flush, unless you explicitly tell it to or you make a DNS/networking related configuration change. DNS records have a Time To Live (TTL) value associated with them which tells a DNS cache how long the particular record is good for. Records in the cache are kept for their TTL, then re-queried.

On a Windows machine you can see a list of all the records in your cache along with their TTL by executing the following command at the command prompt:

ipconfig /displaydns

You can force a flush of all cached DNS records using the following command:

ipconfig /flushdns

For more info:

Wikipedia article on DNS and TTLs

Best Answer

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Windows – How to clear Windows File Cache

DNS Cache – How Often Does DNS Cache Clear on Windows 7

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