Google Chrome – millions of .sst files!

If you’re a Chrome user like me, beware of the latest Google Chrome update preceeding 16.0.912.63.  This version has a problem with the way the database is sorting through web traffic.  It was putting over 20 GB of data of .sst files in

C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\IndexedDB\ directory.

SST files from my experience is like a developer’s placeholder file.   Something that acts like cache and gets destroyed as soon as you’re done with it.  However, in this case the file never gets destroyed and actually multiplies.

Personally I didn’t even notice until my antivirus seemed like it was stuck in the same directory for over 4 hours.  It was then that I noticed the size it was chewing up on my hard drive.

Here’s what didn’t work:

1. Uninstalling – even removing the registry keys with Revo uninstaller for 64 bit machines

2. removing Google sync services and re-applying as I figured it was trying to grab my bookmarks and history

3. Moving the directory elsewhere -it’s not the size of the volume that’ the problem it’s the number of files.  Each one being around 2KB, it calculated it would take close to 8 hours to move.

Here’s what did work:

1. Uninstalling Google Chrome

2. Manually deleting the files via an elevated command line (akin to del *.sst)

It does take some time, mine was little more than 4 hours on a Solid State Drive, but it did all eventually disappear.  On the new Chrome releases it appears okay.  So hopefully this fix saves your bacon and hard disk space.

-Dexter