A long-time personal complaint I had against Netbeans was about its caches and configurations. In modern Windows, it is located on C:\User\<your-user>\AppData\Local\NetBeans and C:\User\<your-user>\AppData\Roaming\NetBeans folder. For Linux or McOS, it is something similar. It is sometimes a pain in the ass for me due to several reasons:
1. The cache is overbloated. It gets only larger and larger over days/months/years of usage. After some months or years of intense NetBeans usage, if nothing/nobody intervenes, it will easily reach some gigabytes full of mostly useless old data. 2. They lies hidden deeply in the filesystem far from the eyes of mere mortals (in a hidden folder!). So, few median NetBeans users even know about its existence or have any idea about how to interact with that. 3. If that gets corrupted for some strange reason, there is no way to clear it inside the IDE AFAIK. I must go to the deep guts of the filesystem and delete it. Otherwise, with a corrupted cache, Netbeans gets confused (rare for me today, but was common for me in the NetBeans 6.x and 7.x days). 4. It lies in user-specific space. So, if my computer is used by several different users, they'll likely get duplicate caches (even for the same projects located in the same HD physical locations), duplicate plugins, duplicate maven repositories, etc. This means a lot of wasted disk space with duplicate stuff. 5. The cache will easily accumulate hundreds of thousands of small files or perhaps even a few millions over the years. Those will tend to be very scattered at the disk, which might lead to poor disk performance when you make a backup by simply copy+pasting the Users folders to some other drive or when you just delete those damn Netbeans folders. Also, I strongly suspect that this contributes to disk fragmentation and they waste a lot of space by leaving a lot of disk blocks consumed but mostly empty. So, I'll question if there is a easy way to purge the cache from the inside of the IDE that I'd overlloked so far for whichever reason? If not, would it be a good idea to add that? Also, is there a way to rate-limit it to avoid it consuming too much disk space? I am very far from knowning the gory details of NetBeans internal stuff, so I am afraid that I am just talking bullshit here and this is a big misunderstanding, sorry if this is the case. However, even if this is the case, I would likely to know nonetheless. It is not just me that hit this issue. Google for "netbeans cache" and most of the results will be from people asking about how to clear the cache because NetBeans got confused or something like that. There is even an old plugin called "Cache Eraser". Victor Williams Stafusa da Silva
