Hi Matt! Seemingly overnight the disk space used by Arc Editor has grown tremendously: it’s now using 27G on my iPhone
On the other hand I also continue to use the old Arc Timeline simultaneously. It’s still using 6.9GB. This may have been caused by a very long-running activity model update I think.
Yeah this does look suspect. Something fishy going on here. Mine is also up to 16 GB. Not quite as high as yours, but still ~2x what it should be.
I’ll investigate…
Ok, so, iOS is a big fat liar.
From every angle we look at it, its numbers don’t add up. Like, they’re wildly fictional, no matter how you try to account for it. If you think “ok it must be Arc Editor + the App Group + iCloud Drive”, even then nope, no, not at all. It doesn’t add up. iOS’s number is still way over that.
Which is not at all a satisfying answer. And my impression is that iOS acts on its own lies - it thinks those numbers are real. But… those gigabytes? They’re not in Arc Editor’s files, not in iCloud Drive, not in the AppGroup. It’s fiction.
So what we’re gonna do is add a new view to the app that shows you what the files in the app actually are, and how big they actually are.
That won’t fix the problem of iOS telling wild lies, or acting on those lies, but it’ll at least let us know what the real situation is.
Great idea! I very much like it, even if only to understand where this comes from.
I found a large source of disk space usage! Basically there was a log file in debug logs that I couldn’t open ( Arc editor battery usage - #7 by trackerminerfs ). I had a hypothesis that maybe it’s because the log file is so huge. So I deleted that one log file. Then the Arc Editor disk usage went down to 9.4GB!
Well that’s… quite weird!
The logs files… it’d basically be physically impossible for them to get that big. So I think it won’t have been that specific log file that was the problem, but… ok I’m going to get a bit speculative here. We’ve really got almost nothing to go on in terms of accessible evidence.
But my speculation is that iOS isn’t calculating those storage amounts in real time, it’s calculating them periodically. And it’s possibly also calculating them to include… well, now I’ll really be speculating, but it could be system log files, temp files, all sorts of things that aren’t part of the app container or App Group or anything we’ll ever be able to see.
And then when you deleted that big log file, my assumption is you triggered iOS to do a recalculation. At which point it managed to do the maths much better than previously. It’s likely still including random system bits in the count, which it probably shouldn’t. But yeah, deleting the log file → triggers a recount → more accurate count this time.
And I think a key clue there is the count dropping from 27GB to 9.4GB. That’s a drop of ~17GB! That’s an incredible amount, that can’t plausibly be attributed to anything inside the app (or the App Group, and probably not even iCloud Drive). And genuinely deleting 17GB of data wouldn’t happen in a second, it’d take minutes to do for real.
So yeah, I’m still of the strong opinion that iOS is just straight up lying. And also that there’s next to nothing we can do about it (other than build this new view that’ll tell us what’s actually there). But at least @trackerminerfs your log file deletion shows us that it might be possible to push iOS into rechecking its maths and partially fixing it!
