[Feedback needed] Setting the right size for /tmp

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I'm running an updated wheezy and today faced with this little 
problematic.

While running Midnight Commander to open (on-the-fly decompression for 
browsing the archive) the kernel source package (a ~75 MiB .tar.bz2 file) 
I got this error:

http://picpaste.com/mc-error-YXdyRawO.gif

My Atom based netbook is not a powerful system but has 2 GiB of ram and 
250 hard disk so, what was happening?

"df -H" told me:

S.ficheros     Tamaño Usado  Disp Uso% Montado en
/dev/sda2        247G  7,7G  239G   4% /
tmpfs            5,3M  4,1k  5,3M   1% /lib/init/rw
tmpfs            212M  664k  211M   1% /run
tmpfs            5,3M     0  5,3M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs            423M  423M     0 100% /tmp		<--- here!
udev             1,1G     0  1,1G   0% /dev
tmpfs            423M  238k  423M   1% /run/shm

Okay, so /tmp is full. Fine. I know how to solve it but I can foresee 
more situations like this in the future so some questions arise. As the 
current tmpfs default settings for /tmp seem a bit "unrealistic" (just %
20 of the RAM?) for even doing common tasks:

1/ How many room should be set for a "/tmp" partition? I never had it one 
so I can't make any good estimation.

2/ Would be better to simply disable tmpfs for "/tmp"? This is how I've 
been doing all these years.

Any comments are welcome :-)

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón