Text documents are typically rather small—unless they contain a few hundred billion characters.
A Steam user was taken aback when his computer alerted him that he was low on storage space. In a very brief period, an extra half a terabyte had been consumed, and it wasn’t due to an accidental installation of Call of Duty or Ark.
## Steam occupies hard drive
Under the handle Top_Order_2533, the affected gamer detailed his issue on Reddit and shared an image displaying the size of the text file.
He mentions receiving a notification that a PC is short on storage space and observes that **500 gigabytes** have been utilized within an hour.
A swift search on his Linux system uncovers a text file in the Steam directory. The file is named **cef_log.txt**.
**What type of file is this?** CEF stands for “Chromium Embedded Framework” and serves as a log file that Valve has been using since 2014. Error messages pertaining to the Steam application are recorded here. It often holds messages regarding network and connectivity issues. Neither the reported user nor anyone on Reddit can clarify precisely how this occurred. However, Top_Order_2533 indicates that removing the file has not yet resulted in Steam generating such a large CEF log again.
It is highly probable that a glitch caused a particular event to be logged repeatedly, leading to the file’s expansion.
### A Linux issue?
On GitHub, another user shared a similar issue just over a year ago, culminating in a file size of 54 GB. In this instance, reinstalling Steam was effective. The operating system was also Linux.
In a six-year-old Reddit post, the issue of abnormally large log files on a Linux system was also noted. A bug in the GPU hardware acceleration of Steam’s web views was identified as the cause of the problem. The fix was to turn off this setting. It remains unclear whether Top_Order_2533’s issue is related to the 2019 bug. In any case, deleting the files does not appear to create any complications, but reinstalling Steam is a viable solution. Notably, 2.67 percent of Steam users operate on Linux, while Mac users account for 1.77 percent, with the remainder preferring to game on Windows.
The post Gamer receives a warning that his hard drive is nearly full—discovers that Steam generated a text file nearly 500 gigabytes in size appeared first on Global Esport News.