Cleaning up /tmp directory on busy cPanel web hosting servers
Usually, the /tmp directory is one of the frequently accessed directories, temp files of MySQL, PHP and other applications are placed and often if processes die, left over. Uploads using PHP are always uploaded to the /tmp directory till they are complete, if you have some dying processes, you will end up with a filled /tmp directory which is hell.
Why? Because MySQL leaves and uses it’s temporary files in /tmp, and if there is no space in there, queries will start failing. Uploads from PHP or Perl are placed in there till the upload process is over, they cannot be further placed there because there is no more space left. So far, we have failing MySQL & inability to upload complete PHP files, system administrator hell.
Easy fix, you might say? Just a simply rm -rf / should take care of it? Nope. Try that, have fun trying to fix the sockets you deleted, specifically applications that depend on the mysql.sock placed in your /tmp directory, things just got worse. In case you actually did delete everything, just restart the services, they should re-appear, if they don’t, they should be somewhere else and you have to create a symbolic link using li, MySQL’s socket is usually located at /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock.
The best way is to either have a script that cleans it up hourly if you know what usually fills it up or manually run ls -alhS /tmp | head and looking what’s causing the problem and how to avoid it in the future, I have developed a script that I run on multiple servers with no problems at the moment. It takes care of the most trash caused on a cPanel server
#!/bin/bash
# Change directory to /tmp
cd /tmp
# Clean up trash left by Gallery2
ls | grep '[0-9].inc*' | xargs rm -fv
# Clean up PHP temp. session files
ls | grep 'sess_*' | xargs rm -fv
# Clean up dead vBulletin uploads
ls | grep 'vbupload*' | xargs rm -fv
# Clean up failed php uploads
ls | grep 'php*' | xargs rm -fv
# Clean up failed ImageMagick conversions.
ls | grep 'magick*' | xargs rm -fv
That usually is enough, my suggestion is to have that run as a cronjob every hour, but I’m not going in detail on how to do that, because if you don’t know how to setup a cronjob, perhaps you shouldn’t be messing around in /tmp directories and deleting stuff on the first place!
Update: This script is faulty and will cause you a lot of problems with PHP sessions, please read more information and read the new one here
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