Re: [Feedback needed] Setting the right size for /tmp

[Dom <toyer@rpdom.net>]

On 28/11/11 18:07, Camaleón wrote:
> 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 :-)

I don't use tmpfs for /tmp for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, some of my PCs don't have much RAM (as low as 32MB), so it's 
just not practical, and on the others I sometimes store up to 4.7GB of 
files to put on DVDs.

I know that I could create tmpfs filesystems bigger than that and they 
would use swap when physical RAM is exceeded, but that would slow the 
systems down to an almost unusable level.

I'd rather either not have /tmp as a separate file system, or allocate 
at least 10GB to it. Disk is still cheaper than RAM, although slower.

--
Dom