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Bug#245465: tmpfs for /tmp



On Saturday 10 November 2007, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> The only case where this will cause trouble is when there isn't enough
> swap. In this case, real memory will start to be used for unused pages,
> not leaving enough memory for caching files, which can cause giant
> performance issues. By default, the tmpfs size is half of that of the
> physical, so with our default swap sizes this is unlikely to happen only
> because the tmpfs filled the swap. If you want to be safe, maybe you can
> increase the minimum swap size from 96 MiB to 128 MiB.

D-I does allow setting up a system without swap and I have seen installation 
reports where users actually did that. Of course, in most cases that will 
be on systems with a fair amount of RAM, but maybe it would be a good idea 
to not set up tmpfs in that case (and just let tmp be part of /).

I've also seen some systems will get really heavy tmp usage. If you look at 
gluck for example, that currently has ~500MB used and I have seen it use 
the full 2.8GB, mostly because of stale files from various cron jobs and 
temporary CVS server files.

I also must say that I'm not sure if I'd want tmp to use up memory/swap 
space on the two old Pentium desktops I abuse as servers here at home. 
Somehow just having /tmp on physical disk just feels safer.
For desktop usage, using tmpfs probably makes sense, but for servers?

Any idea what other distros do?

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