Why is yum cache so big even after yum clean all?

[pwalden]

I have a small older HP OB6000 laptop with F14 on it and only 10GB of disk.

I've been weeding out a lot of packages I don't need on it to carve more user disk space.

One of the biggest disk consumers is /var/cache/yum. My problem is that even after a yum clean all it still consumes over 450MB.

[root@walden5 yum]# du -sb /var/cache/yum
540108965	/var/cache/yum
[root@walden5 yum]# yum clean all
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, remove-with-leaves
Cleaning repos: adobe-linux-i386 fedora livna rpmfusion-free rpmfusion-free-updates rpmfusion-nonfree rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
              : updates
Cleaning up Everything
[root@walden5 yum]# du -sb /var/cache/yum
464078052	/var/cache/yum

There appears to be a lot of older files in cache/yum. However I am concerned about just deleting them without some feedback from this forum.

After a yum clean all, should cache/yum be empty?

[pmdyer]

try to use the --releasever= option. It will clean previously releases, when specified>

# yum clean all --releasever=13

[pwalden]

No that did not help at all.

[root@walden5 ~]# du -sb /var/cache/yum
540142108	/var/cache/yum
[root@walden5 ~]# yum clean all --releasever=13
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit, remove-with-leaves
Cleaning repos: fedora livna rpmfusion-free rpmfusion-free-updates
              : rpmfusion-nonfree rpmfusion-nonfree-updates updates
Cleaning up Everything
[root@walden5 ~]# du -sb /var/cache/yum
540203548	/var/cache/yum

This thing has been upgraded several times from as far back as F8. I suspect there is just a lot of old baggage left. I do not have the knowledge to know what is needed or not. I tried checking access times, but there are known repos out there that have rare updates (e.g. adobe).

Can I just rm -rf * everything in the yum/cache? Will yum not just re-cache everything it needs? Or is there some critical state information being stored in the cache?

[marko]

You could just move it out of the way, then do a new yum check-update:

mv /var/cache/yum /var/cache/yum.old
mkdir /var/cache/yum
yum check-update

and see what happens. If something bad occurs just delete /var/cache/yum and move the old copy back
to the original name.

rm -fr /var/cache/yum
mv /var/cache/yum.old /var/cache/yum

I don't think there'd be a problem.

[pmdyer]

If you want to know which versions of Fedora have cache in the repository, then go deeper:

$ du -s /var/cache/yum/x86_64/*
509460 /var/cache/yum/x86_64/14

If you see that you have repo cache for other versions, then run clean all for the versions that have cache:

# yum clean all --releasever=8
# yum clean all --releasever=9
# yum clean all --releasever=10
# yum clean all --releasever=11
# yum clean all --releasever=12
# yum clean all --releasever=13
# yum clean all --releasever=14

[pwalden]

If you want to know which versions of Fedora have cache in the repository, then go deeper:

$ du -s /var/cache/yum/x86_64/*
509460 /var/cache/yum/x86_64/14

If you see that you have repo cache for other versions, then run clean all for the versions that have cache:

# yum clean all --releasever=8
# yum clean all --releasever=9
# yum clean all --releasever=10
# yum clean all --releasever=11
# yum clean all --releasever=12
# yum clean all --releasever=13
# yum clean all --releasever=14

Thanks pmdyer, this helped me understand better as to what is going on. In fact releasever=12 knocked off 200MB.

---------- Post added at 12:42 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:36 PM ----------

You could just move it out of the way, then do a new yum check-update:


and see what happens. If something bad occurs just delete /var/cache/yum and move the old copy back
to the original name.

I don't think there'd be a problem.

In fact you are right. I just moved the cache/yum out of the way. I did a yum check-update and yum update. The yum/cache directory structures were just recreated without a problem. The size is now down to about 75MB. So this solved my problem.

Looks like there were a lot of older yum structures as the cache/yum went from multiple subdirs to one.

[pwalden@walden5 yum.old]$ ls
adobe-linux-i386                             rpmfusion-free-updates
anaconda-InstallationRepo-200906021801.i386  rpmfusion-nonfree
fedora                                       rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
i386                                         updates
livna                                        updates-newkey
rpmfusion-free
[pwalden@walden5 yum.old]$ cd ../yum
[pwalden@walden5 yum]$ ls
i386

[bonedome]

Thanks for this post, I thought my laptop's 40Gb hd was small.
I managed to get rid of nearly 400 Mb, I have also removed loads of things that aren't needed, like all the non English fonts
I'd also recommend setting your browser to delete the cache when it closes (if you haven't already)