Excessive volume of *.pma files (4MB in size) created by command line calls to brave-browser

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Environment:

  • Ubuntu 22.04
  • Brave Browser: 131.1.73.89 / 131.1.73.91 / 132.1.74.51 / 138.1.80.124

Issue:

Command line invocation of brave-browser creates a .pma file (4MB in size) in ~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/DeferredBrowserMetrics.

I recently wrote a (bash) shell script that loops through a list of search items, for each item it builds a search URL for Amazon’s VINE pages, and then the script passes this URL to a command line invocation of brave-browser. [NOTE: I’m already logged into my amazon account so I’m not passing any login credentials with the brave-browser call.]

While running this script the other day the OS popped up a message stating the root file system was running critically low on space. A quick check with df showed that, yep, the root file system was at 98% full.

After a bit of digging I found the culprit to be a huge collection of .pma files (all 4MB in size) sitting in ~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/DeferredBrowserMetrics.

I have verified:

  • these .pma files are not created if I enter a search pattern directly in an Amazon VINE page
  • these .pma files seem to only appear when I make a command line call to brave-browser
  • each command line call to brave-browser generates a new .pma file
  • this issue (creation of .pma file) occurs no matter what URL I pass in the command line call to brave-browser (ie, this is not related to Amazon VINE)

So far I’ve been unable to find references to brave browser configurations/settings that will disable the generation of these .pma files.

I’ve also come up empty when looking for a command line flag for brave-browser that would disable the generation of the .pma files.

Reproduction:

Both of these commands (issued at a linux command prompt) open a new tab in the currently active brave browser window:

The resulting .pma files:

$ ls -l ~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/DeferredBrowserMetrics
-rw-------  1 user group 4194304 Jul 28 16:34 BrowserMetrics-6887ECD0-A5CB9.pma
-rw-------  1 user group 4194304 Jul 28 16:34 BrowserMetrics-6887ECDD-A5D2A.pma

Questions:

  1. Are there any brave browser configurations/settings that will disable the generation of these .pma files?

  2. Are there any brave-browser command line flags that will disable the generation of these .pma files?

My interim solution is a simple (bash) script that runs a rm against the directory of .pma files. This script is then a) invoked at the end of my Amazon VINE search script and b) scheduled in crontab. While this is an easy workaround I’d prefer that brave-browser not generate the .pma files in the first place.