Gain­ing space on Android after ART->Dalvik switch (root access required)

I (still) use a Nexus S phone. I am using Cyanogen­mod on it. After an arti­cle in a com­put­er mag­a­zine I decid­ed to give the ART-runtime a try instead of the default Dalvic-runtime. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I do not have enough free space free (and all what I can is moved to the USB stor­age already) to real­ly use the ART-runtime.

After switch­ing back to the Dalvic-runtime, I had only 23 of the pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able space free. After a lit­tle bit of look­ing around I found /data/dalvik-cache. I delet­ed with a file man­ag­er the con­tent of the direc­to­ry (you will get some “app crashed/died” mes­sages) and reboot­ed the phone (this is not the same as for­mat­ting the cache par­ti­tion in the recov­ery system).

Dur­ing boot it pop­u­lat­ed the direc­to­ry again and now I have more than 43 of free space on the inter­nal storage.