[arch-projects] [initscripts][RFC] managing /tmp

[Tom Gundersen]

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:16 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the right conclusion has been reached (don't change anything),

Cool.

> but I will add that expecting everyone to have /tmp as a tmpfs is
> extremely limiting. I also disagree with your unbacked-with-facts
> conclusion that "99.99%" of people are satisfied with a /tmp on tmpfs;
> of my 5 machines running Arch only 2 have /tmp on tmpfs. I can think
> of several situations where this is just plain impractical:
> * Running on a VPS/VM with limited RAM
> * Any situation that requires /tmp to be bigger than the size of RAM
> (or even bigger than half of it)
> * Any setup where I have a highly performant RAID setup (or maybe SSDs
> are involved); being on disk will be just fine

It seems lots of people do this. However, I would like to point out
that using tmpfs does not mean that you will use more ram than
otherwise. Just like a normal fs will be backed up by a disk a tmpfs
will be backed up by swap. So all the above scenarios would be better
of with /tmp on tmpfs. (Provided you turn the partition that would
otherwise have housed /tmp into swap space and set the size of your
/tmp partition equal to the size of your old /tmp partition).

The only downside I have found is that there is a 256GB size limit on
files on a tmpfs which does not exist on a normal fs. So if you expect
to have any particular file be bigger than that, you'd better go with
a normal partition.

If I'm missing something, please let me know (I have been
reading/asking around and about this for a while now, so any info is
welcome).

Cheers,

Tom