Why is contacts showing large amounts of cache data?

[Mazie Heffner]

I was clearing up my phone because webster dictionary showed "not enough space, try again later" or something like that. I went in storage and it showed 2 GB free but under cache data it showed 38.28 GB in use. So I went under AVG to find out what what showing the false amount and it said "contacts".
My phone only has 16 GB so I know it's a false amount. It's never done this before.

Anyone know what would make this happen?

 

[Rukbat]

Either the cache calculation software is bad (and it's not really using 38GB - do you really have 38GB of internal storage?), your Contacts app is corrupt and is using all available storage as cache, you have thousands of contacts or your phone needs to be reflashed because Android (or Linux) is corrupt.

Hit the Clean All Cache button. The cache used by Contacts should drop to 0 or some small value. If not, go to Settings/General/Storage (cache is in storage, not RAM, btw), and look at the Cache value after it finishes calculating.

(I have AVG but I haven't installed it yet, so I can't see what it says my phone is doing, but I suspect it's AVG's calculation that has a problem. You probably don't have 38GB of internal storage, so you couldn't be using that much for the cache for one app, even if there was nothing in the phone but that cache (not the Contacts app, not Android, not anything. You can't have 40 ounces of water in a quart bottle, even if there's a mark on the bottle that says "40 ounces".)

The rest of the numbers - for Contacts Storage, and for the other apps' caches and storage - look sane, though.

 

[Mazie Heffner]

I tried clearing the cache but it won't let me under avg nor under settings> more> storage. It comes up with "security policy restricts clearing of this app's cache." And whenever i try to save something or anything else that involves writing to the storage it says "not enough space." I guess my only option left is that contacts is corrupt.

What do I have to do to fix this, please?

Thanks for your help.

 

[lbandrew]

Did you ever get any help with this? I'm having similar problems.