During that time I remember reading that some programs that write to
CDs or DVDs were caching data in /tmp before burning. It seems like
using tmpfs for /tmp under that kind of scenario would be a real
problem. My old box would probably roll over and die, and my newer
one probably would if a DVD image was being built in /tmp.
That info is, admittedly, out of date... but I would want to take a
serious look into such things before putting /tmp on a tmpfs!
It really doesn't matter where these applications cache theire
temporary data. The only importance such considerations have is
in deciding how much space to allocate to your /tmp - it doesn't
matter weather it is stored on a disk partition or a ramfs filesystem.
I think you might be misunderstanding what ramfs does.
using ramfs doesn't put any additional restrictions on
the maximum size of the temp partition. You just have to
add whatever space would have been used for a tmp partition
to your swap partition, and you will be able to support
just as many CD and DVD images.
The effect of using ramfs is to allow things to run faster by
removing any requirement to keep a complete filesystem image on
non-volatile media (disk), and to allow greater flexibility by
allowing disk space to be distributed between /tmp space and
backing store for memory on demand rather than being fixed at
installation time.
I can see where it would work well under sane conditions. It just
seems like problems would emerge if too many little files were created
in /tmp, or if someone tried to burn a DVD with a program that used
/tmp while they had other resource intensive programs running.
Most of the time it should work just fine, so I'll have to try it out.
:) It just seems like many things could go wrong that couldn't go
wrong using a physical /tmp partition. I'm about to set up a
web/email server, and I can see where using tmpfs for /tmp would be of
great benefit in that situation, as long as /tmp and swap are sized
properly.
Dave W.
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