On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Leonid Isaev <lisaev@umail.iu.edu> wrote:
On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 18:07:18 +0100 Geert Hendrickx <geert@hendrickx.be> wrote:
On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 10:55:55 -0600, Leonid Isaev wrote:
Actually, what is stupid is keeping /tmp in RAM. It is an important dir, where you might have an valuable info in case of a system crash. I could never understand the logic behind this choice.
Reducing disk i/o.
Geert
I find this a very weak excuse, because the normal desktop operation is not I/O bound, and the dafaults must be safest. If you compile a lot/use a lot of DB stuff, just mount /tmp to RAM in fstab but this is a special case.
Note that: 1) FHS says: "Programs must not assume that any files or directories in /tmp are preserved between invocations of the program." 2) the contents of /tmp is deleted by initscripts on boot, so if you want to access stuff in /tmp after an unclean shutdown you somehow have to circumvent that. Given the above, there is no reason not to use tmpfs on /tmp (and plenty of reasons to do so). If extra space is required on /tmp, then the most efficient solution is to add to the available swap space. If you have important data, don't put it in /tmp or /var/tmp as neither has any guarantees about persistence. -t