I recently received an email from a client who's frustrated because their invoice PDFs stop downloading after about three months. Initially, I thought it might be due to a caching problem or some backend timeout. However, upon investigation, I found that the PDFs are being generated in the /tmp directory, and the download links expire after 24 hours without actually cleaning up the temp files afterwards. Eventually, this led the server to fail as the disk became full. There were no alerts or logs indicating any failures, so I only discovered the problem after connecting via SSH and seeing over 20,000 leftover temp files. I've made some improvements to the script, and I asked a colleague to look for any other instances of temporary file generation that lacks cleanup. I found a couple more issues like this. I've implemented automatic cleanup, but now I'm trying to convince the team to set up some basic disk monitoring—something that should've been done ages ago.
4 Answers
It sounds like you've handled this pretty well! Definitely push for that disk monitoring; it can save you a lot of headaches down the line. It's also good to ensure temp files get cleaned up regularly. I've implemented something similar at my workplace, and it's made a big difference.
If you're not using monitoring software, consider setting up a cron job to alert you when disk space is low. Just a simple routine can really help keep things in check.
This reminds me of an issue Adobe had where if you received a PDF daily with the same filename, it could eventually stop letting you open it. Once the directory hit a certain version limit, it just gave up. I think they fixed that a while ago, though!
Ah, the good old days of software bugs!
I've seen something like this happen in other software too, where files would just pile up in the temp directory. It's surprising how many programs don’t manage temp files well. I’ve had to create scripts for cleanup as well. Such a simple fix but can be a huge pain if left unaddressed!
That’s true! I had a similar experience with a Windows service that filled its temp directory. Started manually cleaning it up—yuge improvement!
Absolutely, monitoring is key. Otherwise, you risk running into this problem again!