Cache lifetime/Cache flush?

[JasonC]

I'm trying out CloudDrive with Google Drive, and have created a small drive for testing. If I go this route, I'll have a lot of stuff there, including some things I'd like to have served by Plex. I'd like to test the performance when the content has to be pulled from the cloud. I haven't put enough into the cloud drive to over flow the cache yet. Will it just sit in the cache forever, or do things ever stale out? Or failing that, can I flush the cache, so I can force CloudDrive to have to pull from GDrive to fulfill a request?

Thanks!

[JasonC]

Ok, so I just noticed that I wasn't seeing the whole UI, and once expanded I could manage the cache. I've flushed the cache, and told Plex to stream something loaded on the cloud drive. It still doesn't look like anything is pulling from the cloud (no download indicated). It could be system level caching, or maybe I'm expecting it to behave differently then it will?

 

[srcrist]

How much cache have you given it? If there is room, and there isn't a need to replace the content in the local cache, I don't believe that CloudDrive will simply flush the cache just to flush it. There really isn't any need for it to do so. There is no reason, for example, that the local cache would ever be stale--since the only way to modify the drive is via CloudDrive itself, which is always aware of the content residing in the cache vs the provider. If your previous frame of reference is something like rClone, it has a cache expiry because the cache can be stale relative to the provider. That's not the case here. The local cache only ever mirrors remote content. The cache is either mirrored content that has been uploaded to the provider, or content that has been fetched from the provider, in addition to the content that has yet to be uploaded to the provider. 

If you want to force it to clear the cache entirely for testing purposes, I would suggest either detaching and reattaching the drive, or setting the cache size to something exceptionally low so there isn't room locally to cache even a single large file.