What is Chromium doing in the background causing disk activity at certain times?

[Richmond]

This is the output from iotop on Debian:

chromium --show-component-extension-options --enable-gpu-rasterization
--no-default-browser-check --disable-pings --media-router=0
--enable-remote-extensions --load-extension
chromium --show-component-extension-options --enable-gpu-rasterization
--no-default-browser-check --disable-pings --media-router=0
--enable-remote-extensions --load-extension [ThreadPoolForeg]
chromium --show-component-extension-options --enable-gpu-rasterization
--no-default-browser-check --disable-pings --media-router=0
--enable-remote-extensions --load-extension [ThreadPoolForeg]

Some process kicks off between 9pm-10pm in the evening, and possibly
other times, and does much disk activity. It maybe garbage collection,
or maybe due to an extension Ghostery, but I use the same on Firefox
without the same symptoms. This has been happening for a month or two.

What is Chromium (also Google Chrome) up to?

6.1.0-35-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.137-1 (2025-05-07)
x86_64 GNU/Linux

Debian 12

Chromium 136.0.7103.113 built on Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)

[Richmond]

I don't know what this means. What backup?

Anyway, I think I solved the problem by deleting the cache every time I log in, with this command:

rm -rf /home/user/.cache/chromium
rm -rf /home/user/.cache/google-chrome

Also I have added:

--disk-cache-size=1000 %U

to the launcher.

My system has 8G of RAM.

On 15/06/2025 00:35, Daniel Buchanan wrote:

Maybe the backup isn't running?