Saturday, January 15, 2011

IntelliTrace & *.itrace files eating your drive space?

ObjectSmart - Steve's Identity Blog - Missing Drive Space? Check IntelliTrace Files

“..

To find out where my space went, I turned to a simple little tool called Disk Space Finder by IntelliConcepts.  There are probably a million applications like this, but this is the one I always seems to remember.  It scans through your hard drive checking file sizes and breaks down usage as necessary.

If you leave IntelliTrace enabled for all debugging you could potentially end up with a couple hundred *.itrace files like I did (not actually pictured).  It looks like an itrace file is created every time the debugger is attached to a process, so effectively every time you hit F5 a file is created.  Doubly so if you are debugging multiple launchable projects at once.

The quick fix is to just delete the files and/or stop using IntelliTrace.  I recommend just deleting the files because I think IntelliTrace is an amazing—if not a little undercooked – tool.  It’s a v1 product.  Considering what it’s capable of, this is a minor blemish.

The long term fix is to install Visual Studio 2010 SP1, as there is apparently a fix for this issue.  The downside of course is that SP1 is still in beta.  Hence long term.” [GD: Click through to for the path. I didn’t want to leach too much from the original post, walking that fine web curation line]

This tip helped me recover a couple gigs of drive space across a couple of machines. Now this amount might be an edge case, given I launch a number of VS solutions as part of my blogging. Still I was surprised at the amount used and how much drive space I was able to recover (hence my sharing of the post ;) 

Final note, my favorite “drive space usage spelunking tool” is WinDirStat (blog post). Whenever I need to hunt drive space hogging files, this is my utility of choice…

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Greg
I deleted itrace files and it freed 3 GBs. windir stat is my favorite tool also .