Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useful
On 05/26/2012 01:33 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> On laptops and other power sensitive devices, this is pretty critical.
>
> Hypothetical: I have 2GB of RAM, and I want to watch a 50MB video file
> on a connection that will take, say, 10 minutes to cache the whole thing
> (and its a 10 minute video).
>
> With a regular filesystem hosting /tmp, Every 30 seconds I will wake up
> the hard disk, and write data to it. I doubt most spinning disks will
> go to sleep in < 30 seconds, so this is more than 10 minutes solid of
> hard disk spinning.
>
> With tmpfs, there is no memory pressure, so my disk never even spins up
> to write anything to it. If I do run into memory pressure, yes, I need
> to use swap at that point. But at that point I've got a lot more than
> just the disk draining power.
>
Now, another hypothetical. Same machine but with 1 GB of RAM (please,
don't tell me that's unusual...), a 600 MB video file, with a video that
is 2
hours long. You have Firefox started (to watch the video), and many
pluggins and many tabs open, and it's taking 600 MB of RAM (that's
nothing really unusual, unfortunately). After a while, your HDD starts
spinning like hell, because it's swapping...
Thomas
Reply to: