IntelliJ 9; caching a lot of data under C:\Users\..

Question

Is there a reason why IntelliJ creates a lot of files under C:\Users\<username>\.IntelliJIdea90 ?

This directory has slowly grown to around 2GB. I can understand IntelliJ needs to perform some caching for local history, and indexing, but 2GB seems a litle excessive

Is there a way to safely clear down some of this data and free up some disk space?

Answer 1

I haven't yet heard of unexplainable growth of those indices, maybe there is a reason after all.

You can safely delete that directory (with IDEA not running), but expect a full rebuild of the index on next startup. If you want to preserve your configuration, though, consider only removing system/caches and system/index.

Edit: Back at work, I had a look on my machine:

$ du -sh ~/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea90

3,8G /Users/jjungnickel/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea90