ArcGIS Enterprise

Monthly Linux Tip: Handling Temp Space in ArcGIS Server

NOTE: ArcGIS Server 10.8 is utilized in this blog but is relevant to versions 10.3-10.7.1, also.

When working with ArcGIS Enterprise, a common point of interest for users is service performance. As time passes and more services are published, service performance increasingly matters to your deployment. In this Monthly Linux Tip, we will look at two lesser known tricks of handling temp space in your ArcGIS Server site to help service performance.

IATEMPDIR

Our first tip pertains to the initial installation of ArcGIS Server. As noted in the system requirements, resources are extracted to your system’s /tmp directory. In other words, when installing ArcGIS Server, resources that come along with the initial setup are extracted to the /tmp directory.

However, there may be scenarios where you elect to utilize a different location for the resources to be extracted. Such scenarios include lack of required space in the /tmp directory or you simply want a different location. This is where IATEMPDIR comes in handy. Let’s look at the below example:

As shown above, we created a new directory named “new_temp” in the root directory. Utilizing IATEMPDIR, we have now specified an alternate temp directory. It is important to note that IATEMPDIR is specific to installing ArcGIS Server. Meaning that tasks such as publishing will still point to the /tmp location.

To change the local temp folder, that is where SERVER_TEMP_DIR is useful.

SERVER_TEMP_DIR

Previously mentioned above, IATEMPDIR is helpful for initial installation of ArcGIS Server, but what about after? Seeing as publishing is an everyday task, we need to ensure our temp location has adequate space to avoid performance issues. Within /ArcGIS Server Installation Directory/arcgis/server/usr, there exists the file init_user_param.sh:

In a nutshell, the init_user_param.sh file is where user environment variables are initialized to be utilized with ArcGIS Server. Viewing this file, we notice this section following near the bottom:

By default, the temp folder location used is found at /ArcGIS Server Installation Directory/arcgis/server/temp. We can override this line to specify the location we want to use:

Afterwards, we save this file, restart ArcGIS Server and should see a message stating the following:

We have successfully updated our temp folder and new services that are published will have their intermediate output point to this new temp directory.

In this blog, we have discussed IATEMPDIR and SERVER_TEMP_DIR to help in service performance as it pertains to temp space on your system.

Please feel free to leave a comment on this blog and thanks for reading this Monthly Linux Tip!

About the author

Markus is a Product Engineer on the ArcGIS Enterprise team, where he specializes with Linux architectures.

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