Spotfire Server: explanation and management of very large temp files in "AttachmentManager" folder

Problem:

Explanation and management of very large temp files in the "AttachmentManager" folder on the Spotfire Server.

Solution:

The AttachmentManager folder on the Spotfire Server may get filled up with a large amount of data, which can cause disk space issues, if there is not sufficient space on the installation directory disk. By default, this will be:
<Installation Directory>\spotfire\spotfireserver\<version>\tomcat\temp\AttachmentManager\

This article describes what the Attachmentmanager does and what measures can be taken to manage its size to avoid disk space issues.

The "AttachmentManager" handles data transfers to and from Spotfire Server, for instance, Library downloads and uploads. The Attachment Manager is used when large amounts of data are transferred between Spotfire Clients, Spotfire Web Players or web browsers and the Spotfire Server. The Library uses the Attachment Manager to transfer the actual content when downloading or saving items, and Information Services uses it for downloading the result of an information link execution. So, this folder holds the Information Link cache and also the files while large analyses are being opened from the library. These should are normally deleted after the cache expiry or after a restart of the Spotfire Server service.

The Attachment Manager can cache Library Items and Information Links. This Caching is enabled by default, but can be completely disabled using the content-caching-enabled and result-caching-enabled settings. Documentation reference: Custom configurations for managing space needs.

For Library Items, the cache will never return any stale data and they are cached by default. For Information Links, each link has to be explicitly set as "cacheable" when it is created in the Information Designer. It is the responsibility of the user that creates the information link not to mark it as “cacheable”, if the result may depend on things outside the control of Information Services, such as database row level security.

The Attachment Manager can be configured either in the Spotfire Server Configuration Tool user interface or via the config-attachment-manager config tool command line. For example, in the configuration tool, under Configuration tab-> Attachment Manager:

The cache is encrypted by default and the size is limited in terms of disk usage. If items are to be evicted, a least recently used-algorithm is used. Library Items have higher priority and will always be evicted after Information Links.

Attachments in the cache will time out and be removed after a configurable amount of time. Default values for the cache expiration time and the max cache size are 24 hours (86400 seconds) and 10 GB (10240 MB). Unused or older temp files should be removed as more space is needed. Always ensure there is sufficient disk space to accommodate the value of the "Max cache size(MB)" setting. If there is not sufficient disk space, then the "Max cache size(MB)" should be set to a value which is guaranteed to be available on the installation drive.

If there is a problem with the connection from the server to the client when transferring data or calculations, or if the client crashes unexpectedly, the temporary files may not be removed automatically and may need to be cleared manually. It is not recommended to remove any temp contents while the Spotfire Server is running, as to avoid any user interruption. First stop the Spotfire Server services, then remove any temp files from the \AttachmentManager\ folder.