KNRK’s program director called me over so I could look into why his music scheduling program was running so darned slow. He’d already performed the obligatory reboot to no avail, so I dutifully went to his office and watched the software misbehave as claimed. The problem manifested as long pauses of up to 90 seconds when performing random tasks.

I checked the Task Manager. NTVDM took up most of the CPU power during those pauses. Fine, so the Virtual DOS doohicky was working overtime. Why? My next thought was to check the program’s working directory on the server for telltale files. I found them, alright. I found four thousand of them.

VDM(hex-numeral).tmp files. All of them zero bytes in size, ranging in age from a couple of days to a couple of years. Apparently the VDM never, ever deletes these puppies. So I did, and it… almost helped.

I looked deeper. Deeper into the directory structure, that is. In one of the subdirectories I found something that really surprised me: 65,000 of those VDM*.tmp files.

Whoah.

I wasn’t at all surprised that deleting all of those files made the program work better. In fact it ran considerably faster than the PD expected, as he’d grown used to it being fairly slow. My next amazing feat will be the implementation of a timed script that regularly removes those damned “temporary” files…