I think people get annoyed when the temp files don't get deleted after the process is complete and the files continue to accumulate forever.
I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why ODBC drivers for an older version of MS Dynamics NAV would randomly cause crashes starting 5am on 12/31/2018. Looking at the queries, we noticed that only queries with ORDER BY clause failed with an error about not having enough swap space. The drive had plenty of storage so we weren't sure. Only when we looked into the Temp folder for SWP*.tmp files did we see an interesting result: 65535 file(s).
Apparently the driver created swap files in the temp folder to sort the results of ORDER BY. But sometimes it failed and left the temp files orphaned. The name of each temp file was SWP[int 1-65535].tmp. It appeared that at 5am it created the max 16-bit int swap file and from that point on, every number it tried already existed, throwing the 'not enough space' error. A simple delete fixed the issue.
The path we took to get to the solution was riddled with panic-fueled nightmares. DB corruption on the last day of the year when Finance was running their year-end reports would have been a terrible way to usher in 2019. We ran all the tools on the DB and its backups but nothing seemed to isolate the cause until we looked at the Temp folder on a whim.
Apologies for the long rant but just wanted to highlight a real-world (and still painfully sore) example of annoyance from temp files.
People get upset over all sorts of things. Look at this thread [1] where everybody without a clue gets involved to solve the mystery of an NTFS ADS called :WofCompressedData.
Depends on whether that temporary file gets properly cleaned up or not. A myriad of temporary files with more showing up every day could be a significant disk hog, especially for an enterprise with thousands of affected employees.
Hundreds of tutorials and books have taught people to save example files into the temp folder going back to the DOS days leading them to believe it’s a directory they own and control rather than one shared by anybody.
Also I suspect badly designed cleanup utilities would complain about SQLite files that cannot be deleted because they’re in use leading to web searches.
I actually worked in desktop support a couple of years ago but I never got anything about temp files, most of the time it was the usual stuff (Internet stopped working, computer won't boot, etc.)
I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why ODBC drivers for an older version of MS Dynamics NAV would randomly cause crashes starting 5am on 12/31/2018. Looking at the queries, we noticed that only queries with ORDER BY clause failed with an error about not having enough swap space. The drive had plenty of storage so we weren't sure. Only when we looked into the Temp folder for SWP*.tmp files did we see an interesting result: 65535 file(s).
Apparently the driver created swap files in the temp folder to sort the results of ORDER BY. But sometimes it failed and left the temp files orphaned. The name of each temp file was SWP[int 1-65535].tmp. It appeared that at 5am it created the max 16-bit int swap file and from that point on, every number it tried already existed, throwing the 'not enough space' error. A simple delete fixed the issue.
The path we took to get to the solution was riddled with panic-fueled nightmares. DB corruption on the last day of the year when Finance was running their year-end reports would have been a terrible way to usher in 2019. We ran all the tools on the DB and its backups but nothing seemed to isolate the cause until we looked at the Temp folder on a whim.
Apologies for the long rant but just wanted to highlight a real-world (and still painfully sore) example of annoyance from temp files.