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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless



On 05/25/2012 05:33 PM, Mehdi Dogguy wrote:
>> What if we're installing Debian on a very small system, and that we
>> need operations with big files in /tmp?
>>
>
> Increase your swap? 

So, in this case, we will have the following scenario:
- An app writes in /tmp
- There's not enough space, so the system starts swapping,
including some apps.
- The file gets written to /tmp, then gets read
- Finally, the file gets deleted
- Then we have randomly very sloppy reaction of apps
that were swapped out so that the file could be written
in /tmp.

So, when the user is just opening a big file form any app
that is writing to /tmp to give it to another one (let's say,
a viewer...), he is *expecting* that operation to take some
time, and most of the time, that's not really a problem to
wait for some file to open.

But a user rightly does *not* expect to have *random* waits
for his $application to respond, which frankly, is *extremely*
annoying. And that's what you are proposing by increasing
the swap space.

Cheers,

Thomas


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