Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useful

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

Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:

> On Tue, Jun 05, 2012 at 09:29:46AM +0300, Serge wrote:
>> 2012/6/1 Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> 
>> > All the complaints about /tmp as tmpfs come down to one simple issue:
>> > The size of the tmpfs isn't chosen well.
>> 
>> Mounting /tmp to tmpfs not just breaks a lot of apps and reduces system
>> stability, but it actually does nothing else. You get no benefits from
>> /tmp being on tmpfs.
>> That's the complaint: the change makes something bad and nothing good.
>> 
>> > Even without load it is much faster because fsync() becomes a NOP.
>> 
>> Yes, it is. So it's a good idea to use tmpfs for some apps, that
>> heavily use fsync() on files that fit in RAM. But... wait... no app
>> is heavily using fsync() on files in /tmp. So it's useless to put
>> /tmp on tmpfs.
>
> It takes one application using fsync on any file in / for all files in
> /tmp to be flushed to disk if it's the same filesystem. It doesn't need
> to be the application using /tmp doing fsync.
>
> Mike

For example runing "apt-get upgrade" while doing other stuff that uses
/tmp.

MfG
        Goswin