title: How to deal with huge amount of temporary files generated by IntelliJ IDEA?
body: <p>I've found out that IntelliJ IDEA generates a lot of temporary files while I'm running tests. Files are placed in default location - <code>C:/Users/username/AppData/Temp</code>. The majority of generated files have name pattern <code>idea_test_XXXX.out</code>. These contains some kind of partial logs of test executions.</p>
  
  <p>I've noticed IDEA performance degradation with a lot of files generated (this is only speculation, as I can't run any benchmarks) and more importantly some functions stop working. For example, right now I can't use file search (see picture - working search result in either number of matches or warning that nothing was found, and on the picture none of them present):
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZrVOs.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZrVOs.png" alt="search doesn&#39;t work"></a></p>
  
  <p>Simple restarting or 'Invalidate caches and restart' cannot help. To fix this issue I have to clean up temp dir and restart IDEA. So, I'm blaming these files in that search issue.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Is there any way to disable temp file generation or to put them into custom directory via IDEA configuration (for example, project target directory, which is cleaned up automatically in our workflow) ?</strong> </p>
  
  <p>I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 14.1.6 Community Edition on Windows 7. I have enough free space on hard drive. I work with Java/Groovy project, tests are written on both languages, we are using TestNG.</p>