How would I measure the improvement in the speed of my computer that results from deleting temp files

Question

In another question about the validity of the advice to delete temporary files, no answer described how they measured the speed improvement. If I delete the temp files, or allow a software program to do the job for me as part of a disk cleanup, how much faster will it make my computer run, and how would I know? Yes, I know it will vary from one computer to another based on many many factors, but how would I measure the speed difference?

Answer 1

Personally, I don't believe in that advice, partly because my TEMP folder currently contains 2270 files in 196 folders with no bad effects.

For a slow-down, you would need to run a program that:

1. Uses the TEMP folder,
2. Opens lots of files in it.

The TEMP folder would need to contain many thousands of files and folders for any effective slow-down. If the number of files in the folder doesn't exceed a few hundreds, then any improvement will be measured in milliseconds.

My advice : Don't bother.

Answer 2

I expect that the majority of those claiming a performance gain from deleting temp files have done no measurements at all and evaluations were completely subjective. Such tests are subject to the placebo effect and are of questionable value. And of those that did do measurements most would have been too simplistic to produce meaningful results.

Performance tests are often difficult and tests involving files are particularly so. The results are heavily dependent on the hardware and exactly what operations were done and the state of the system before the tests. And the tests themselves will effect the contents of the file cache and other things. And that is what makes such testing so difficult. Unless proper precautions are taken you often end up measuring something other than what you are trying to test. At the least you would need to repeat the tests several times both before and after deleting the temp files with a reboot between each test. It would likely take several hours. But I suspect the reality would be even more complex.

I would not care to devise or run such a test. And after all was done I fully expect the results would be inconclusive. Delete temp files to save disk space but don't expect performance improvements.

Answer 3

Some applications are useful for your propose. I just listed two popular on optimizing category
1. IO bit advanced system care 12. 2. AVG tune up 2019. There are some tools to measuring your system speed by cleaning garbage files on both applications.