Gallery Workflows with R Creating Temp File wqy-microhei.ttc

[craigbloodworth]

Since upgrading Alteryx Server Gallery to 2019.3.2.15763 the temp directory on our C drive (not the gallery settings specified temp drive or folder) has been filled with a 4MB file called wqy-microhei.ttc.

After investigating I've found that Rterm.exe is creating this file and failing to delete it:

Looking at the timestamps I think it's coming from a workflow which updates Alteryx Connect with data from the Gallery. Anybody seen a similar issue?

[PaulN]

Hi @craigbloodworth,

Thank you for posting this question.

This is a -completely harmless- side effect of a patch introduced with 2019.3 (DE18722 for reference). 

Predictive tools now load R library showtext to address an issue impacting Asian characters.

This library depends on sysfonts and showtextdb that will create font file wqy-microhei.ttc in R temporary folder.

Hope this answers your question,

Best,

PaulN

Sr Customer Support Engineer, Alteryx

[raychase]

@PaulN - does this mean we're obligated to manually delete these files + folders?  They add up quickly on the VM that hosts our Alteryx Server.

[jleung322]

Seconding this. These files actually filled up storage on the server and we were unable to run our predictive workflows. Any way to disable this?

[chrisha]

We had several of our scheduled workflows abort last night because there wasn't enough space to write temp files. Everything related to the Gallery should be written to our 😧 drive, but C: was filled with several Gigabytes of the wqy-microhei.ttc file in the temp directory on C:

I don't think this is harmless. It is ticking time bomb. I have deleted all those directories now (more than 60 GB), but I need to check our hard disk every now and then, because obviously this is bound to happen again.

[PaulN]

Hi @jleung322, @raychase  and @chrisha,

Thank you for your messages.

My original answer was not considering the case of heavily used environments which may lead to the production of a lot of file. Also, current workaround is to manually removed files wqy-microhei.ttc and associated folder,  I would suggest to contact support@alteryx.com for follow-up. 

Thanks,

Paul Noirel

Sr Customer Support Engineer, Alteryx

[jleung322]

Thanks Paul, I have a ticket open with support already and will update here if I receive a better solution.

[raychase]

@jleung322 - that would be great if you can pass along any information you garner from Support.  There simply has to be a better option than a scheduled .bat file to clean up these 'temporary' files.

[PaulN]

Hi @raychase, @craigbloodworth, @jleung322, @chrisha,

I have built a workaround to prevent the creation of these files and an article explaining the procedure will be posted soon.

For now, unfortunately, the only workaround is to remove the files manually.

Thank you for your patience,

Paul Noirel

Sr Customer Support Engineer, Alteryx

[chrisha]

Hey,

has there been a fix, workaround, solution, ... made available somewhere?

Best

Christopher