Mesa's Shader Cache Will Now Occupy Less Disk Space

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 27 April 2017 at 08:50 AM EDT. 33 Comments
MESA
Mesa previously had a hard-coded limit to not take up more than 10% of your HDD/SSD storage, but now that limit has been halved.

In a change to Mesa 17.2-dev Git and primed for back-porting to Mesa 17.1, Timothy Arceri has lowered the cache size limit to 5% of the disk space. He noted in the commit, "Modern disks are extremely large and are only going to get bigger. Usage has shown frequent Mesa upgrades can result in the cache growing very fast i.e. wasting a lot of disk space unnecessarily. 5% seems like a more reasonable default."

Those seeing Mesa's shader cache directory take up a significant amount of disk space are likely habitual Mesa Git riders and/or running a lot of shader-heavy games.

In another commit he has also improved the disk cache to use the block size rather than file size to more appropriately the cache size.

The good news so far is that Mesa 17.1 continues to have the shader cache enabled by default, so it looks like it may stay that way for the release happening in just one or two weeks.
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