When installing and using SketchUp MAKE 2017 on windows 7, a 16.2 Mb folder is created that gets written to the Windows user roaming profile:
AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2017\WebCache
What exactly is the function of this folder, and will it grow any bigger with time and further use of MAKE?
Are there personal settings held in the folder?
I intend to block this from being written to the user roaming profile by Windows Policy, but will this have any effect on a roaming user as far as using Make is concerned?
As of 2017, SketchUp changed to using an embedded Chromium web library instead of relying on the OS’s libraries. This was done to improve consistency in the face of a great many issues from different OS versions of the web libraries. Most web-related items in SketchUp already use Chromium, and the rest will be migrated at some point.
I believe that folder is where the embedded Chromium web library now keeps its cache (the equivalent to the folder where any other browser keeps a cache). If you prevent SketchUp from writing there, it is likely that many items that use the embedded Chromium will cease to work correctly.
Or, at the very least, features that rely on embedded Chromium will work far slower because that have to download resources (that should be cached) every time the feature is used.
The following features may cease to work, or (as Steve D. said,) may load more slowly, and / or cause higher data network usage. Also will likely put more demand upon sketchup.com servers.
Extension Warehouse (installing, upgrading or uninstalling extensions / plugins.)
3D Warehouse (searching, downloading and inserting warehouse models.)
Add Location (setting the model’s geolocation and / or inserting aerial imagery or terrain mesh data.)
Generate Report (Pro edition only. The v2 report generator interface is cloud based.)
Any extension that opens a cloud based HTML interface or gets any images from the web to display in the web browser frame.
The workstation Windows Policy will simply prevent the contents of the Webcache folder from being written to the user roaming profile.
It will still be accessible by the program for the user while logged in.
I noticed that this folder rapidly increased in size from 7 Mbytes to over 50 Mbytes with just adding a few 3D Warehouse items.
This would then normally be written to the user profile on logout. As you can imagine, this would rapidly fill up the roaming profile quota, causing my organisation all sorts of problems, and I think that this is not a well written part of the program, or at least I should be able to deploy it with an option to not write it to the user profile.
Over time, and with a number of users, you can also imagine that the w/s itself will rapidly be filled up with the contents of the webcache.
However, as it is a cache folder, this can be deleted without any affect on saved SketchUP files, and the folder is simply recreated when the program is started up again. So I also intend to wipe the contents of this folder on device boot to prevent future file space problems on workstations, as it has no effect on the user experience in my tests.