Craft creating over 250.000 cache files

Question

My Craft CMS 3.7.38 is creating over 250.000 almost identical cache files inside the /storage/runtime/cache/-folder. Because the website isn't even a frequently used big platform, I have no idea why the framework is flooding the cache in such a way, resulting in the website crashing because the hoster limited the number of files to a reasonable amount.

I already tried to reduce the max cache time, I disabled all plugins to be sure that it's the framework itself, I am not using any {% cache %} tags myself in the templates and it seems to be connected to using matrix fields. Currently, I can only flush the "data cache" once a day to prevent the website from crashing.

Almost all cache files look like this:

a:2:{i:0;a:1:{i:0;a:0:{}}i:1;O:37:"craft\cache\ElementQueryTagDependency":3:{s:4:"tags";a:3:{i:0;s:7:"element";i:1;s:29:"element::craft\elements\Entry";i:2;s:32:"element::craft\elements\Entry::*";}s:4:"data";a:3:{s:40:"CraftCMSce35088bdfe0816226cd17fd051a1234";s:21:"0.45746100 1651155155";s:40:"CraftCMS2743a789e8993267a348eee1ee7e8742";s:21:"0.45746100 1651155155";s:40:"CraftCMS0c445ad43e1ed6e749c63233356asd57";s:21:"0.54989000 1651155155";}s:8:"reusable";b:0;}}

Thank you for any kind of hint.

Answer 1

I experienced a similar issue, and tracked it down to a web spider crawling the Solspace Calendar plugin for Craft. There are no bounds on the calendar, and so the bot was hitting pages like /calendar/day/2033/07/09.

I guess Craft sees all those pages as unique because of the unique URL, and creates cached files for each one. My temporary fix was to just ban the bot. But I think the permanent solution will be to prevent the "Next" and "Previous" buttons from appearing on the calendar pages when they hit a certain limit.

Not sure if this helps with your specific issue, but thought it might help someone else when they run into something similar.

I would suggest searching your web access logs for a bot that might be caught up in your link structure.