Re: /tmp as tmpfs and consequence for imaging software

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Salvo Tomaselli <tiposchi@tiscali.it> writes:

>> While amazon.com "cloud" may have small RAM and large disks, many
>> mainframes are opposite (ie, IBM big blue, japan's world simulator).  And
>> many new PCs may become that way: no spin :)  Maybe not!
>
> I think we are focusing a bit too much on super expensive computers here.
> Of course on a computer with 1TiB of RAM it is faster to keep /tmp on ram. 
> Also, given the availability of a reliable power source i would decrease the 
> frequency of syncs to disk, in order to work mostly on buffers on ram.
>
> Unfortunately debian targets also different devices, such as ARM network 
> attached storage with huge disk and 32MiB of RAM.
>
> -- 
> Salvo Tomaselli

So make the installer check and default to different partitioning
schemes.

That said I would still try tmpfs with large swap on a 32MiB system to
avoid the fua/flush and journal writes. tmpfs will use less erasures and
thereby make my flash last longer on my embedded arm device.

And on a 1TiB of RAM system you usualy run software that needs that much
ram and allocates it in big chunks. You wouldn't want the software to
hang to swap out 100GB of tmpfs. Better to have a real filesystem for
/tmp there that will already have written out the 100GB in the
background.

So you might have a point to the opposite effect than you intendet.


Overall any default will never work for all cases. It's a default, not
THE LAW, change it when it doesn't suite.

MfG
        Goswin