Question / Help [SOLVED] Livestreaming taking up too much disk space

[Dr Scrubbington]

I'm noticing that when I livestream on YouTube it uses up a lot of disk space on my C drive. I'm talking gigabytes here, because the stream is an (almost) 24/7 live subscriber count for multiple channels. I figured this would be due to the browser's cache, so I tried to find where it was all stored, but I can't find any temporary or cached files that are gigabytes in size. I've tried this on both Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and I can't find it in either. So then I thought it must be OBS itself. However, when I go into the AppData to look for huge files, I can't seem to find any folders that take up gigabytes of data. There has to be some way to clear this data without restarting your computer... am I doing anything wrong, or is there actually no way to do this? By the way, I'm not livestreaming and recording at the same time, I'm just livestreaming, which is what confuses me.

I've uploaded this log file. It's from my last session of the stream:
https://gist.github.com/fc1eb7112c0ab9ce89c27942d89e9cc5

 

[Harold]

Try running windirstat to see where the big files actually are.

 

[FerretBomb]

I prefer TreeSize for hunting down large files. It lets you drill down visually, and sort-by-largest to speed things up. They also have a free version that isn't time or functionality limited.

That said, chances are good that it's just your system cache/swapfile going nuts if you're running out of memory, and it gets resized larger. I have a few programs that end up with runaway commit charge if I leave them running long-term (none of which are OBS; most notably Razer Synapse, and Chrome on occasion). This can happen EVEN IF you have plenty of RAM, and it's not in-use, due to how Windows tries to aggressively keep less-used memory in swap, and with some poorly-coded drivers.

So yeah... chances are that it's not OBS doing this.

 

[Dr Scrubbington]

Alright, I'll try TreeSize and see what I can find. I'm also going to try streaming again and opening Task Manager to see what's using up my disk the most. It might be a program because it actually didn't clear up when I restart. I'll report back with what I find.

 

[Dr Scrubbington]

I used TreeSize to find that all the space being used up was actually in the Temp folder of AppData --> Local, rather than the files of the programs themselves. I didn't even know that folder existed, and it's taking up an entire third of my C drive space - over 100 GB. It seems these temporary files aren't so "temporary" after all. Now that I found it I can finally clear out my C drive which has been nearly full for a very long time. Thank you!