When PHPStorm’s cache eats up your harddisk space

I recently stumbled over this: By default PHPStorm (obviously in all versions since 1.0) creates a local history of all your “changes”. And this cache size is not really limited and also does not reset from time to time automatically, resulting in extremely big cache files. There are reports of folder sizes of 25 GBs (which might become critical when using a 64GB SSD). Have a look into the application’s system\LocalHistory folder (on Windows systems in C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\.WebIde80\):

PHPStorm offers a native trigger to reset these cache file, directly in File > Invalidate Caches / Restart. Do that. Remember that this will remove the “latest” file change history, and you’ll not be able to undo your “last” steps. But in the age of version controlling this shouldn’t be a problem.

Afterwards, your history cache files are reset to 0 kb. PHPStorm will build up a new file change history over time.