With over 150 million active users, Discord has quickly become a popular hub for both gaming and non-gaming communities to gather. However, as usage grows, so have complaints around deteriorating app performance including lagging calls, repeated crashes, and painfully long loading times.
The culprit? An overstuffed Discord cache cluttering up precious storage space and introducing errors.
The good news is this is easily correctable through regularly clearing away these temporary files. Just a few quick navigation steps tailored to your device allows you to practically "reset" Discord for a speedier, glitch-free experience.
In this guide, we’ll cover step-by-step cache clearing instructions for:
- Mac
- Windows
- iPhone
- Android devices
- Web Browsers
So no matter how you access Discord, you’ll fix irritating issues with sluggish speeds in no time!
Why Does Clearing the Cache Speed up Discord?
To understand the immediate boost from flushing your cache, let‘s quickly cover how apps use caching in the first place.
Whenever you open and interact with Discord, background processes retrieve the needed assets like messaging data assets from Discord’s remote servers, storing temporary copies on your device to avoid re-downloading frequently reused items.
Over time, rarely accessed cached items stick around while new entries are added. The cache grows huge, hogging up local storage capacity – as high as 2-3 GB based on studies of caching behavior in popular social and messaging apps.
These swollen caches introduce performance drags and stability issues:
- Local storage congestion slows lookup times
- Outdated cache entries cause conflicts
- Corrupted temporary files create errors
This manifests as everything from intermittent lag to outright app crashes!
Luckily, resetting Discord by deleting the cache forces it to rebuilt a clean set of temporary data optimized for your current usage patterns.
Without legacy cached clutter, Discord can operate smoothly, loading screens and message sending nearly instant. Servers connect quickly without errors and calls won‘t drop or lag out. So if your Discord suffers any of the above, try cache clearing below!
Step-by-Step Instructions to Clear Discord Cache
Below I‘ll walk through the straightforward workflow to flush your Discord cache for each major platform.
To ensure no important messages or files get unintentionally removed, we‘ll directly access Discord‘s cached data rather than device-wide cache.
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On iPhone
I‘ll be demonstrating with iOS screenshots, but the process is virtually identical latest iPadOS releases.
Apple won‘t allow directly deleting third-party app caches. So an alternate reset approach reinstalls Discord fresh automatically clearing associated temporary data in the process.
Step 1: Open Settings > General
From your device homepage, open Settings followed by General:
Selecting General reveals additional option groups:
Scroll down through the various device and app management settings until you find the iPhone Storage option which we‘ll use to manage Discord‘s local data next.
Step 2: iPhone Storage > Discord
Tapping iPhone Storage opens a storage use breakdown between:
- System data
- Media
- Apps
- Mail and other accounts
Under Apps, you‘ll spot Discord‘s allocated storage.
Select Discord to expand details like recent usage metrics and temporary file size – likely high if you‘ve yet to clear cache before.
Step 3: Offload App
With Discord selected, notice the option near bottom to Offload App:
Selecting this removes Discord while preserving all favorites, preferences and other user data.
Step 4: Reinstall Discord
Finally, open the App Store and redownload Discord. After installation, just log in normally.
Discord will rebuild any needed caches from scratch optimized to your current usage patterns for optimal performance.
I recommend revisiting these iPhone steps every few months to keep things speedy!
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Hopefully the instructions above help you keep Discord running as smooth and responsive across all your devices as when you first installed it!
But don‘t hesitate to drop any questions below – happy to help out with any hiccups. And if you found this guide useful, feel free to share with fellow Discord users who might also be struggling with frustrating performance issues.
