Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless
On 05/25/2012 11:08 AM, Serge wrote:
> I wasn't able to watch a web presentation (from something like
> vimeo/youtube), because there was not enough free space in /tmp for flash
> player to download and show it. Also mc was not able to open archives
>
On the server side, you can add that MySQL often uses /tmp,
for example mysqldump does, and files there can be huge too. It
can be extremely dangerous to have a server's /tmp getting full,
and swap getting highly used (eg: potentially, your server could
simply crash).
There's something you didn't address in your exhaustive list of
reasons why /tmp shouldn't be tmpfs. One of the argument that
most tmpfs advocate have is that most of the time, /tmp is sued
for small files, and in that case, it's faster. In reality, it's
not that much faster, thanks to Linux caching of the filesystem,
the write-back, and all sorts of mechanisms that improve
performances on disk-based filesystems. So I still wonder what's
the point. Maybe we should add a /small-files-on-tmpfs (choose
a better name, of course...) folder so that apps know what to do,
that'd be a lot more graceful than just switching to whole /tmp
to tmpfs without any app knowing about it.
I also think that having /tmp using tmpfs by default is a *very*
bad move, and I agree that you were right to bring this
discussion again if this bad choice for the default partitioning
didn't go away. I also agree that at the very least, there should
be a clear option for this in the installer (with non-tmpfs by
default, IMO, but if there's a high priority question, then it
doesn't matter much...).
Thomas
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