Found 70GB of Alamofire_CFDownloads in 3 days

Related Projects Alamofire
1

I'm not a developer using Alamofire, but clearly some of the apps I use use it. I've been having to reboot my macOS 12.6 machine every few days as it gets critically low on disk space.
I've now tracked down Alamofire as being involved so I've come here.

Since last reboot, just 3 days, it accumulated 70GB of Alamofire_CFDownloads*.* files in /var/...

My question is how can I tell which of my many apps are kicking off these downloads? Or is there another way to diagnose or stop such a rapid build-up, without the very tedious business of stopping every app in turn not running for a week?

2

You can try using fs_usage to track what is writing where.

3

Thanks. But I discover that fs_usage is a firehose, and it doesn't seem to allow filtering ... any guidance on how to use it for this task, please?

4

Something like sudo fs_usage -f "filepath" | grep /var should get what you want. You can then narrow the grep down to the particular tmp directory you need.

I'll investigate adding something to DownloadRequest to make it easier to clean up these files.

5

Thank you. Am now monitoring.

6

Hmm, to my surprise the first item process that writes an Alamofire file is 'Finder' (if that's what column 5 means). Or is that not surprising?

7

Shot in the dark: Do you have some kind of Finder extension that syncs files? DropBox, Google Drive, etc.? Maybe they run in the same process, and happen to be using Alamofire.

8

Thanks.
I'm running both Dropbox and Google Drive for years, but I've never seen this behaviour until the last few months.