Text documents are usually pretty small—unless they have a few hundred billion characters.
A Steam user was astonished when his computer notified him that he was running out of storage space. Within a very short time, an additional half a terabyte had been used up, and it wasn’t an accidental installation of Call of Duty or Ark.
Under the username Top_Order_2533, the affected player shared his problem on Reddit and posted a picture showing the size of the text file.
He describes receiving a message that a PC is running out of storage space and notes that 500 gigabytes have been added within an hour.
A quick search on his Linux system reveals a text file in the Steam folder. The file name is cef_log.txt.
What kind of file is this? CEF stands for “Chromium Embedded Framework” and is a log file that Valve has been using since 2014. Error messages related to the Steam application are stored here.
It often contains messages about network and connection problems.
Neither the affected user nor anyone on Reddit can explain exactly how this happened. However, Top_Order_2533 reports that deleting the file has not yet caused Steam to create such a large CEF log again.
It is very likely that an error caused a specific event to be logged over and over again, causing the file to grow.
A Linux problem?
On GitHub, another user posted a similar problem a little over a year ago, which resulted in a file size of 54 GB. In this case, reinstalling Steam helped. The operating system was also Linux.
In a six-year-old Reddit post also encountered the problem of unusually large log files on a Linux system. A bug in the GPU hardware acceleration of Steam’s web views was found to be the source of the error. The solution was to disable this setting. It is unclear whether Top_Order_2533’s problem is related to the 2019 bug. In any case, deleting the files does not seem to cause any problems, but reinstalling Steam is a working solution. Incidentally, 2.67 percent of Steam users use Linux as their operating system. Mac users account for 1.77 percent, and the rest prefer to play on Windows.