newsd Consumes A Great Amount of Space
I was trying to recover some space on my 2015 MacBook (yes, the first generation, and still alive and kicking!) when I noticed that in ~/Library/News/ there is a folder called newsd which had a cache folder called shared-asset-assetstore, and it was taking up 32GB of space! That’s over 6% of the 500 GB SSD.
This was unusual as I have never read the news on that MacBook. Or perhaps it is precisely because I don’t consume any of the stored news items that they are kept for me. Notably, the equivalent directory on a machine where I do read news from time to time consumed 1.76 GB of non volatile memory.
I initially thought I could turn that off in the Apple>System Preferences>Sharing>Content Caching settings. However, that feature is not the right one – it is about shared downloads for system updates.
So I went into my iCloud settings and unchecked “News” under iCloud. This warned me that saved news items etc won’t be available. Which is fine by me. I immediately regained that space. The newsd folder was quickly deleted by the system.
Moral of the story? Turn off services that you don’t use explicity: there is a cost to running on default mode sometimes.