How IntelliJ IDEs waste disk space

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Ashish Bhatia · 2025-09-14 · via ashishb.net

I love IntelliJ IDEs. I use Android Studio for Android, PyCharm for Python, and GoLand for Go. They are powerful.

I just wish they didn’t fill my 500GB disk as if there is no tomorrow.

For example, with IDE settings left over from old installations.

$ du -shc ~/Library/Application\ Support/JetBrains/* | sort -h
...
264M    JetBrains/PyCharm2023.2
359M    JetBrains/PyCharmCE2023.2
382M    JetBrains/PyCharmCE2023.3
387M    JetBrains/PyCharmCE2024.1
625M    JetBrains/GoLand2023.2
927M    JetBrains/GoLand2024.1
938M    JetBrains/GoLand2023.3
950M    JetBrains/GoLand2024.2
...
5.3G    total

If you check inside, it is mostly “plugins” that are consuming the disk space. It is safe to delete all the old versions of the settings unless you are planning to downgrade.

Google built Android Studio on top of IntelliJ IDEA. And Android Studio is no better either.

$ du -shc ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/* | sort -h
...
228M    Google/AndroidStudio2022.3
230M    Google/AndroidStudio2023.2
231M    Google/AndroidStudio2023.3
233M    Google/AndroidStudio2024.1
240M    Google/AndroidStudio2024.2
241M    Google/AndroidStudio2023.1
...

It is safe to delete all the old versions of Android Studio unless you are planning to downgrade.

And what if you got errors in their IDE?
Well, that can lead to a CPU profiling data dump worth GBs as well. And it is completely safe to delete it.

1
2

$ du -shc ~/java_error_in_pycharm.hprof
2.6G    ~/java_error_in_pycharm.hprof

And then there are obsolete cache every time you upgrade one of their IDEs

$ du -shc ~/Library/Caches/{Google,JetBrains}/*
...
2.5G    /Users/ashishb/Library/Caches/JetBrains/GoLand2024.1
2.8G    /Users/ashishb/Library/Caches/JetBrains/GoLand2024.2
2.9G    /Users/ashishb/Library/Caches/JetBrains/PyCharmCE2024.3
482M    /Users/ashishb/Library/Caches/JetBrains/PyCharmCE2025.1
...

It is safe to delete all the old versions of the cache unless you are planning to downgrade.

All in all, I recover about ~10-20GB+ every quarter by just deleting these files.
The other big culprit is Docker, but that’s a story for another day.

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