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lastala
Participating Frequently
July 17, 2012
Question

Disk Cache piling up

  • July 17, 2012
  • 11 replies
  • 190513 views

Hi,

I have a "problem" with After Effects disk caches that don't get emptied from the application itself, but have to be emptied manually. They eat a lot of hd-space (multitude of GigaBytes).

What I found, that at least when I select clip(s) in Premiere Pro and make then an Adobe Dynamic Link => New After Effects Composition, this procedure starts to pile cache files to a location:

/Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Adobe/After Effects/11.0

to a folder called: "Adobe After Effects Disk Cache - <computername>.noindex"

That cache does not get emptied from anywhere in After Effects, selecting to empty the caches in AE does not remove them. So, I found them with a laborous manual search.

Now, I suppose (but don't know) that this folder can be deleted without any harm? Secondly, I would expect After Effects or Premiere Pro to be able to find and empty these caches on demand. This is not the first time I've noticed Adobe applications start to eat mysteriously hd-space, but it is the first time I'm able to locate where and from which process. Would anyone have a comment?

    11 replies

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    Tim Kurkoski
    Adobe Employee
    Tim Kurkoski
    Adobe Employee
    July 17, 2012

    A few points about the After Effects disk cache:

    1. You can empty it from within AE by going to Preferences > Media & Disk Cache, then click the Empty Disk Cache button.
    2. From this preference panel, you can also disable the cache, change the limit on how much disk space is used, or change the location it is stored. If you do change the location, favor a fast disk with a reasonable amount of space. The faster the disk, the quicker AE can write frames to the cache and load the frames back into memory for playback, thus the more useful the disk cache becomes.
    3. Yes, you can delete these files from disk, outside of the application interface. There will be no penalty other than AE having to rebuild the frames when they are requested.
    4. No, this cache does not automatically delete itself; that's an intentional part of the design, to have the cache be persistent. But it does have a maximum size that you can define in the preferences, and it will overwrite the oldest entries when it runs out of room.
    5. These cache files can build up at any time while you are working in AE. You may have noticed them building up while using an AE comp via Dynamic Link because AE builds the cache while it is idle. If you're a fast worker in AE, it may not have much idle time, but while you're working in Premiere Pro the background instance of AE probably has lots of idle time.

    More information about the disk cache can be found here and here and here.

      L
      lastalaAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      July 18, 2012

      Thanks for you reply, Tim.

      1. You can empty it from within AE by going to Preferences > Media & Disk Cache, then click the Empty Disk Cache button.

      Just one point: no, you cannot empty this cache folder by going to Preferences > Media & Disk Cache, then click the Empty Disk Cache button. As I stated before, this procedure does not empty the cache mentioned earlier, that was my point in the beginning.

        Tim Kurkoski
        Adobe Employee
        Tim Kurkoski
        Adobe Employee
        July 18, 2012

        Sorry, overlooked that detail in your original post.

        BUT... it worked for me just now. When I click the disk cache button, the entire contents of the "Adobe After Effects Disk Cache - computerName.noindex" gets emptied.

        Have you changed the location of your disk cache in the preference? If you have previously changed the location of the cache, clicking the Empty Disk Cache button won't clean out any non-current location. You can delete the files manually.

        Also, if you click the Empty Disk Cache button while Premiere Pro is running with a dynamically linked AE comp in it, I'm not sure what will happen. The linked copy of AE running in the background might lock the cache files in use. Quit Premiere Pro and double-check in Activity Monitor that only one instance of AE is running.

        Otherwise, I have no definitive answer. If you change the location of the disk cache, say to a new folder on your desktop, does emptying the cache work? (RAM preview a comp to generate some cache files in that folder.)  It's also possible that you've got some sort of permissions issue on the folder. Quit AE and maybe try trashing the whole .noindex folder, or maybe trash the 11.0 folder (your AE prefs are included in that bundle, so back up the files in case this doesn't work). Then try again. If not, maybe a new user?

        Again, you can trash the files manually if you want. There's no harm.

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