Temp files under production server root directory/tmp folder

I encountered this once a couple years ago. At the time, the conclusion was that the files were related to "Jaspersoft Reports". Appian does not use "Jaspersoft Reports" anywhere in the product, but it's possible that a custom plugin could be making use of it. I would recommend that you start with that line of investigation.

In general, no.

If it's filling up with junk, you may want to look at what software isn't cleaning up after itself.

You can also use find to identify files which haven't been modified or accessed in a long time that is probably safe to delete.


Most Linux distros automatically clean out /tmp/ on startup. While this doesn't necessarily help if we're talking about a no-reboots-EVER server here, one possibility might be running find ./ -type f -atime 14 -exec rm {} \; every week or so to delete any plain file that hasn't been accessed at all in the past two weeks..

You should really look at what is in there before you decide to remove it. Doing a rf -rf * on anything is inherently dangerous.

Define huge ... because if you using Appian to handle docs , using larger templates more than 1MB , starting 100 processes each day and the time to complete a process is around 15 days, a TEMP directory with 1GB is reasonable.
My advice to you is buy more HDD to not have the space problem, maybe you should consider building a farm of Appian servers (if the company is big) and put some CRON jobs that will take care of those folders.