Reduce Disk Usage by Automatically Removing Old Expert Data

[manhvu]

After using Expert for some time, I noticed that it consumes a significant amount of disk space (around 1 GB per repository). Since I usually work with multiple repositories, this quickly adds up and leaves me with very little free storage on my system.

Currently, I have to manually delete the .expert folder to reclaim disk space. It would be great if Expert could automatically remove old or unused data, or at least provide a configuration option to manage disk usage.

Environment

• IDE: Zed Editor + Expert
• OS: macOS

[sophiathedev]

@manhvu I had a look at the code on main (2afc03c). This looks more like a disk usage/cache retention issue, but we'd need some measurements to tell whether cleanup is missing something. There's already cleanup for build groups where the newest .beam is over 62 days old, though that's based on file modification time, not when the build was last used. Indexes are also stored separately for each Erlang/Elixir version, and I didn't find automatic cleanup for old versions. Logs already have rotation. I haven't reproduced the ~1 GB usage yet. Could you share your Expert, Elixir and OTP versions, plus the output of du -h -d 3 .expert from one of the affected repos? Feel free to redact any sensitive paths. That should help us see whether most of the space is active build artifacts, old builds, indexes or logs before deciding what to clean up. #500 is related, but covers the shared engine cache rather than the per-project .expert directory here.

[doorgan]

@sophiathedev if you have 10 moderately large projects and each has a >1gb index(not uncommon by any means), that's at least 10gb you have laying around on your filesystem all the time. This issue is to implement pruning for them. I don't think any measurement or further logs are needed for this, we only need to track the projects we know expert was used on and check its last used date to see if it should be pruned + a command to do this manually.