Why does windows disk cleanup take so long

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why does Disk Cleanup take so much time and cpu? Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 1 month ago. Active 3 years ago. Viewed 84k times. What does it do that is so intensive?

Improve this question. SushiGuy 5 5 bronze badges. Svish Svish 34k 59 59 gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Doesn't it also calculate the space saved when compressing the oldest files those not opened recently? Nice video! Will definitely check into that tool :D — Svish. Svish have you verified this?

Is the question answered? Arunas Bartisius Arunas Bartisius 1, 12 12 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. Claudio Claudio 31 1 1 bronze badge. This is not an answer to the original question. If you have a new question please ask your own question referencing this one for context if it helps. So why does it take that long for a task that basically just deleting files? Now, we have a answer from The Old New Thing who offers a bit insight as to why. Second, it checks the system and sees whether it would benefit from compression of system files.

If so, it compresses the uncompressed system files and that uses a lot of CPU times. Next of Windows. This is a command that goes by the nickname deep clean , and it scavenges the component catalog looking for components that are no longer being referenced. Normally, the system automatically does component scavenging on a schedule maintenance task. The automatic scavenging has a policy of waiting 30 days before removing an unreferenced component, and it also has a self-imposed time limit of one hour.

But the special command line above bypasses both the day grace period and the 1-hour timeout. Unreferenced components are removed immediately, and the task will run to completion, even if it takes more than an hour.

Comments are closed. Well dang, I was running the cleanup tool manually because I knew it uses quite some CPU and wanted it to get it over with on my schedule rather than random system schedule.