title: Why does Passenger keep passenger-error-*.html files in /tmp?
body: <p>A disk on one of our servers was filling up. Analysis showed that most of the space was wasted in <code>/tmp</code>.</p>
  
  <p>The culprit was the 25,000+ files there that were taking up more than 3 gigs, all of them named after the pattern <code>passenger-error-xxxxxx.html</code>. A quick inspection showed that this was the standard error page Passenger serves when it cannot start an application.</p>
  
  <p>From the message in one of those files, Passenger could not start the application because <code>mysql2</code> gem was missing and it couldn't connect to the database.</p>
  
  <p>From a rough estimate, it seems as if Passenger kept these files <em>at least for each request</em> which was due to health checks from ELB (request every 30 seconds = 2880reqs/day, Gemfile was fixed after 5 days which should be less than 15,000reqs).</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is it documented anywhere that Passenger keeps these HTML files in <code>/tmp</code>?</strong></p>
  
  <p>Why does it do that? Is something wrong with our config?</p>