On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 02:21:28AM -0500, Rick Thomas wrote: > On Jan 23, 2008, at 1:40 AM, Ron Johnson wrote: > >Rick wrote > >>On my own systems, I make swap huge (10 GB or more for 1 GB RAM -- > >>Disk > >>is cheap!) so I can mount /tmp on a tmpfs filesystem. > > > >Is this for apps that say "if malloc() fails, I create a tmp file"? > > IOW, you pretty much ensure that malloc() will never fail? > If you have /tmp on physical disk (e.g. an ext3 filesystem) the > process of opening a file for writing, writing it, closing it, re- > opening it for reading, reading it back in, closing it and deleting > it, hits the disk several times, even with a large buffer cache. But > if that file is in a tmpfs filesystem and you've got enough ram, the > disk never gets involved. If it's in a tmpfs filesystem but you > don't have enough ram, you have to swap, but you're no worse off than > you were with the disk-based filesystem. > > Given that logic, and the fact that tmpfs is limited by the size of > swap plus the size of ram, and the observation that disk is cheap and > getting cheaper, why not make swap as big as you're ever likely to want?
It also makes having an encrypted /tmp easy to set up. Since /tmp gets cleared on boot, it may as well start out empty. Set up encrypted swap and put /tmp on tmpfs. Now they're both encrypted. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
