MSDN Library: good environmental citizen



  • For those who install and frequently use MSDN Library in your local system, check out the litter an MVP discovered.

    @ Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP said:

    Open an Explorer
    window wherever you have your %TEMP%. To keep things simple, empty it
    first. Else just navigate to the bottom of the window.



    Now
    open MSDN Library from Jan 2005 and navigate around. Notice that for
    each page you view, there is a new IMTxx.XML added to your temp
    directory. If you close MSDN, the files are still there.



    I first saw this with Books Online for SQL Server 2005. That is a beta, but MSDN Library is not, as far as I know.



    Judging from the files I found in my TEMP, this has been going on since the July-2004 Library or so.



  • Actually, Arent a lot of programs guilty of littering the temp folder?



  • A quick "dir /s" on my temp directory shows

         Total Files Listed:
                 938 File(s)     88,852,101 bytes
                 158 Dir(s)  42,112,675,840 bytes free
    so I'm willing to bet MSDN Library isn't the only program with this "problem."



  • Actually dropping temp files is still fine by me, but to create an XML file for each page view I make, that amounts to thousands for me. It's a good thing I manually clean up my %TEMP% once in a while.



  • ah- I was wondering what was creating those files. I thought it was vStudio itself...



  • I have a startup script that empties the temp folder each time I start my computer. That'll keep your temp folder size in check. And MSDN i definately not the only program that leaves 'temporary' files to pile up in the temp folder.



  • I've found this interesting post a few days ago: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000385.html

    I tells how to tweak your Disk Cleanup registry settings to clean more files than the usual and to skip compressing old files. It did a great job for me!


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