Clean Out Temporary ASP.Net Files on your MOSS servers

This article is all about the C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files folder on your MOSS systems…..

I was alerted by one of my systems this morning that I am running out of diskspace on the systemdrive. After running my favourite tool for this kind of situations, TreeSizeFree.exe, I discovered it was hanging while enumerating a sub-sub-sub…. folder of the Temporary ASP.Net Files folder. Don’t you hate it when a tool you have always relied on hangs like that? Well, I do. Of course copy/paste the path into a cmd window and runing the dir command showed me what was wrong. After endless enumeration of that particular folder I discovered that there were 182000 (that is One hundred and eighty two THOUSAND) files in the folder. No wonder my tool hanged a while. So what’s next? How will I clean this up. Here are the commands I used to cleanup that mess:

1. Stop IIS
     iisreset /STOP

2. cleanup the folder(s).

The problem here is that there are a lot of subfolders in there that need to be cleared as well, so you have two options:

A. using the rd command in combination with a for statement:

for /d %i in (“%systemroot%\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\*”) do RD /q/s %i

B. using robocopy. Just create an empty folder in some place and them run robocopy with /MIR. For example:

md %TEMP%\empty
robocopy %TEMP%\empty “%systemroot%\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files” /MIR
rd %TEMP%\empty

(Found this trick on a comment on a blog article of Doug Steward who actually wrote another way to do it)

3. Finally restart IIS

iisreset /START

Some of you might prefer to reboot the system because IIS is down anyway at this time.

So hope this helps you out somehow if you discover a lot of files in there