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[JENKINS-22088] Disk space leak with multiple copies of winstone-XXXX.jar in TEMP folder #22933
Description
Continued operation of Jenkins creates multiple copies of "winstone.jar" with a numeric suffix in TEMP folder (winstone12343543634634.jar). We had about 800Gb of these accumulated, slowing down the host system.
We are currently running Jenkins directly (`java -jar jenkins.jar`) via Windows scheduled task.
Originally reported by 
t0yv0, imported from: Disk space leak with multiple copies of winstone-XXXX.jar in TEMP folder
- assignee:
ifernandezcalvo
- status: Closed
- priority: Major
- component(s): core
- label(s): winstone
- resolution: Fixed
- resolved: 2023-06-22T09:51:07+00:00
- votes: 20
- watchers: 34
- imported: 2025-11-24
Raw content of original issue
Continued operation of Jenkins creates multiple copies of "winstone.jar" with a numeric suffix in TEMP folder (winstone12343543634634.jar). We had about 800Gb of these accumulated, slowing down the host system.
We are currently running Jenkins directly (`java -jar jenkins.jar`) via Windows scheduled task.
- environment:
Windows 8.1 x64, JDK 1.7.0_51, Jenkins 1.553
Activity
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Mar 7, 2014
Remote links associated with this issue:
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon May 5, 2014
Raw content of original comment:
This is a serious problem. I just discovered that my Jenkins installation, which I don't even use, has been filling my drive with these files for at least 2 months, taking up several hundred GB of space. This is on Mac OS X 10.9.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon May 19, 2014
seand:
Raw content of original comment:
I had this issue also. In my case it was caused by the Jenkins service starting and failing constantly and creating a winstone*.jar file in the temp folder each time. This was happening because Jenkins was already running as a process when the service was trying to start. I fixed it by killing the java process for Jenkins in Task Manager, then starting the Jenkins Service.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Apr 22, 2015
amandaxu:
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Hello There. I am running into the same problem. Is there a workaround? My Jenkins version is 1.542. Thanks in advanced.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon May 11, 2015
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Hi there,
I have the same problem with Jenkins ver. 1.612 on Windows 7 64bits.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Oct 12, 2015
gsxjay:
Raw content of original comment:
Same here on 1.627 on Windows 2008 R2 64 Bit. I'm going to manually clear it out, but this should be fixed.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Nov 9, 2015
aarondmarasco_vsi:
Raw content of original comment:
This seems to happen on non-Windows as well; I have a Linux server and have a bunch in /tmp.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Jan 8, 2016
deepakkoirala:
Raw content of original comment:
Is there a workaround yet? Do we need to manually delete all the winstoneXXXXXXXXXXXX.jar? Deleting these jars won't affect anything, right? We have Jenkins ver. 1.613, installed in windows server and facing the same issue. Almost 70 GB space is full within 3 months. And I saw most of the space is taken by winstone.jar in temp folder.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Mar 24, 2016
Raw content of original comment:
Same here on Windows 2008 Server.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon May 3, 2016
dan:
Raw content of original comment:
I just stumbled upon this Issue and used https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Tmp+Cleaner+Plugin as a workaround.
Had to set all mentioned parameters with system properties when starting Jenkins but result was a cleaned /var/tmp after that.
YMMV, but might be a valid workaround. HTH, Daniel
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Feb 3, 2017
johey:
Raw content of original comment:
I was also affected by this on Windows Server 2008, caused by an old jenkins process lying around while the service started another. A new winstone-XXXX.jar of 2 MB was created once every two seconds. I killed all java processes, deleted all files and restarted the service. Now there's only one of these jar files.
I don't know the inners of jenkins, but there should be some sanity check before creating a new winstone-XXXX.jar.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Feb 7, 2017
Raw content of original comment:
Hello. Just run in this issue on our build server.
Jenkins ver. 2.32.1.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64 Bit.
winstone-XXXX.jar was created and filled up disk space on C:. Solution was to kill all Jenkins/Java processes and restart Jenkins.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Mar 23, 2017
Raw content of original comment:
same here. We just upgraded to 2.32.3 a couple of days ago and now I have this issue. Didn't have it before, at least I did not notice anything.
The question is, can I delete them safely?
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Mar 23, 2017
johey:
Raw content of original comment:
juristr, you probably have an old process running from the previous version. Close all jenkins processes including any old ones, remove all of the temp files and start it up. That's how I solved it and I'm pretty sure it's safe.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Apr 10, 2017
Raw content of original comment:
I can reproduce this error. Set jenkins as a windows service. then stop it. Install another application which is using 8080 port. restart the jenkins service. it will keep generating winstone.jar
16 remaining items
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Apr 5, 2019
Raw content of original comment:
ifernandezcalvo thanks again!
As per your suggestion, I updated my start shell script to:
Now the extra winstone jars are cleaned up on startup, I also tested a safeRestart and again there was only 1 winstone jar file (for the running Jenkins).
So it's solved for me, cheers!
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Aug 14, 2019
shashankkulsh:
Raw content of original comment:
This issue is happening with my current Jenkins build 2.156 on windows. Is there any solution for windows for this.
Disk is getting full, due to so many winstone*.jar in C:\...\AppData\Local\Temp folder
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Aug 15, 2019
Raw content of original comment:
shashankkulsh Did you read the comment before yours? there you have the solution *--extractedFilesFolder=c:\TMP-FOLDER-PATH*
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Nov 11, 2019
barna10:
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Is there any plan to fix this? Seems wonky that Jenkins knows where to write the jar, but not where to go to delete it.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Sep 24, 2020
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I just had my Windows 2012R2 Jenkins 2.257 server fall to its knees for the second time in a week after something threw a spanner at Jenkins (started as a service). Jenkins was convinced that it needed to restart itself, which failed due to address already in use, so try again and again and again, dumping a new copy of winstone#.jar each time until out of disk space.
This bizarre behavior seems to be the result of how the Jenkins service is created by default, first failure: restart, second failure: restart, subsequent failures: restart.
For now I've set subsequent failures to 'take no action' - hopefully this will ease the pain.
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Jun 22, 2023
chrisfetz:
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I am currently experiencing this issue with a jenkins 2.401.1 (LTS) running on Windows server 2016. Still seems to be an active issue...
jenkins-infra-bot commentedon Jun 22, 2023
Raw content of original comment:
The issue was fixed and nobody report a hit in five years, Could you open a new one with the details of your environment and reference this one?