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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useful



2012/5/25 Thorsten Glaser wrote:

> It’s faster because the files don’t even get written to disc if
> they’re kept for, say, five minutes, and aren’t just short-lived.

Theoretically, yes. But I'm not asking to forbid everybody to use
tmpfs. We're talking about defaults and about the most used test
cases.  Can you name some popular real-world program that write
only small files and become noticeably faster when /tmp is on tmpfs?

> Every tool either supports setting TMPDIR=/var/tmp before running
> it or is buggy. Go fix these instead

Do I understand you right? You suggest every tool that need large
tmp files to use /var/tmp instead? Ok, then... what popular tools
should use /tmp now?

> And then there’s the CF card usecase. Or SSD, nowadays, I guess
> (my IBM X40 just got two CF cards to replace the HDD). There, you’d
> absolutely want to minimise disc writes.

/tmp on tmpfs won't help in that case. You do not reduce number of disk
writes, you just move them to other directories. As you suggested, all
the programs will still use files i.e. in /var/tmp. Or they'll write to
swap if tmpfs is large enough. Or they'll just break, if it's small.

But you'll get the same number of SSD writes (or maybe even more,
because of other applications being heavily swapped as well).

Again, I'm not asking to drop this feature. I'm asking to have it disabled
*by default* but supported by debian installer, so really smart people,
that know what may be broken by it, but really need it, could enable it.

-- 
  Serge


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