Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (715 mails)

[Graham Anderson <graham.anderson@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 28 Mar 2012 16:38:38 Jos Poortvliet wrote:
> In short, I would STRONGLY recommend against mounting /tmp tmpfs. That ONLY 
> works for advanced users as they can fix the resulting problems themselves.
> Anyone who keeps their PC on for a longer period of time will see that
> folder grow and grow and grow. Eating memory instead of diskspace is bad in
> itself, running out of space there is worse...

That's not the pattern of usage for a tmpfs /tmp that I see. I'm certainly not 
a lightweight user and usually run with longish uptimes between the kernel 
updates. At home I have my /tmp tmps limit at 1GB on my 16GB system, the 8GB & 
4GB systems run 512MB & 256MB respectively. I use the largest RAM machine as 
my main workstation. I don't currently set /tmp to be tmpfs on servers, but I 
plan to in future.

Currently on the largest RAM machine that I use as my main workstation, with a 
modest 27 days up /tmp is consuming 179MB, with 173MB of that being chromium 
cache. In practice I find *most* software and scripts behave very well in how 
they use /tmp. 

I've been using tmpfs /tmp since 11.3 and It's true, once or twice that I can 
remember, I have had software not work correctly because /tmp was full. The 
first occasion was from watching a long Flash video in Firefox. The second 
occasion was either Audacity or Spotify filling /tmp as it's scratch disk. The 
flash problem went away when I stopped browsing with Firefox and switched to 
Chromium. The second problem was of course trivially fixable, all reasonable 
applications that might use a large scratch disk have easily configurable 
scratch locations in the options/preferences.

Of course these two times when software failed due to a full /tmp are in my 
opinion much preferable to the alternative. The alternative is that when /tmp 
is a physical volume and badly behaved software fills the whole volume 
(usually the / volume as well) the whole system is brought to it's knees. This 
has happened to me often enough from badly written scripts, bugs or software 
and is the main reason I started using tmpfs /tmp.

One other side thing, which might be nice for some users, is sometimes 
noticable performance benefit from having caches (including browser cache) in 
tmpfs /tmp.

The other benefit I am looking forward to, if we progress far enough with the 
"/usr" move, is read only / , and so tmpfs /tmp to me makes perfect sense.

So in summary I agree with what most people want. Lets *not* introduce any 
*surprises* on upgrade and if we can make this sensibly configurable too 
outside of any defaults on a new install (if we go down this route).

However I think it does make sense (with tangible benefits) to consider tmpfs 
/tmp for most desktop users. Lets face it, if you're a power user who is going 
to be using _large_ amounts of /tmp due to scripts, data manipulation, 
compiling or using "power apps", you're more than capable of configuring your 
system to compensate.

I see Firefox + Flash as an issue on this though, what can we do about that?


Cheers the noo,
Graham
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