2012/5/25 Miles Bader: > I can't say whether it's a good default or not (though it seems to > work pretty well in practice)
It dosn't always work in practice. Among the problems I faced myself... 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 (IIRC it partially opened them, not showing most of the files) because of the same reason. I'm not sure how a database server would handle the case when it's unable to do a filesort to complete SELECT. Anyway, it really causes problems in practice. > But the OP's argument is completely silly. Most apps use /tmp not for > "reducing memory usage", but for communicating with other apps (of > course, often, such as in a shell script, or indeed the user himself, > the choice of /tmp is not done by the app itself, but by the invoker) -- > it's a common namespace. Ok, I agree. There're two main /tmp usages. Some applications use it to save memory (databases, archive managers, cd burners, image processors, science software, the flash player after all). Other apps use it for communication (browsers, mail clients). But in both cases these files may be large and should be still stored on real disk, not on tmpfs. And having /tmp on tmpfs makes it useless for both usages. > Of course it's the rare exceptions to this that cause problems; The matter is that exceptions are *not rare*. A simple 2-hours-long video presentation may cause you problems. Pressing Enter in `mc` on linux-kernel-src.tar.bz2 may cause you problems. On the other hand it gives no real benefits. Making a small tmpfs will break apps. Making a large tmpfs may slow down the system because of high memory/swap usage. Moving sockets from disk to tmpfs also gives no benefits. The only case when you theoretically could benefit from having /tmp on tmpfs is when you have a software, that creates a lot of files there that are guaranteed to be small. Actually I can't think of any software, creating a lot of small-only files in /tmp. -- Serge -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/caoveneqx1vlbmn4ejdfj29puj5ebjp9dhrmea7gprf8+gzd...@mail.gmail.com
