During a recent CF upgrade, I backed up the cfusion directory in case of disaster, like I always have. It took a long time. Investigating, I found about 3.25 Gigs worth of files in \cfusion\runtime\work\Catalina\localhost\tmp\ Most were pdfs, some xls, some doc, all seemingly content specific to the app (not CF), going back to 3/2021. It's not super critical, but by far the longest part of a CF update is copying the cfusion directory, so trimming that back would definitelyspeed things up. Is there a setting that's causing these to get written to disk? One for how long to keep them? Some process that's supposed to get rid of them? Can I manually delete them all while ColdFusion is stopped?

I think that's just the default upload directory when you use https://cfdocs.org/gettempdirectory So I'd imagine they can be deleted. Worth checking your code to see if you use

gettempdirectory

and then see if that code also does a cleanup once it's done with the file.

Bingo, you're right. Found some client document upload code from 2011 that uploads the doc, then COPIES it, not moves it, to where it goes, so the tmp copy exists forever. Bleh.

wait - you're saying that the CF temp directory doesn't get cleaned out during a CF restart? or are you saying that you copied the cf admin folder while the server was still running, so they hadn't been cleaned out yet? i've always assumed that folder got cleaned out with each restart, but i've never actually checked.