What are Temporary Files

Do files with an extension, '.tmp' clutter your computer memory? Have you often been advised to clear the temporary files for increased browser performance? That means you have had some experience of working with temporary files!

What are They?
When a computer program is unable to allocate sufficient memory for its tasks or when a program has to work on data larger than the address space provided by the system architecture, temporary files are created. Their creation by a computer program may also be the result of some form of inter-process communication.

Temporary Internet Files
The Internet browser cache consists of temporary Internet files. The files that are downloaded with web pages are stored as temporary Internet files. Thereby, a cache of the web pages visited, is created on the computer hard disk. They remain there until the user deletes them manually.

These files give rise to Internet privacy issues, as it is due to these files that the pages visited by a user remain available to the other users using the same local computer for Internet access. They also consume a fair amount computer memory. But that does not make them worth only the deletion. They can be useful in certain ways. Cached websites are available offline, thanks to temporary Internet files. These files help a computer maintain traces of the websites visited.