Anton Aylward wrote:
First, a tmpfs is mapped to memory in a way that slightly more efficient than a disk based FS. Yes, disk based FSs are mapped to memory, buffers, for reading writing inodes and super-blocks as well as shuffling the B-trees and indexes and more. By comparison a tmps is incredibly light weight.
Secondly, Linux uses a demand paged virtual memory so you're never going to run out of memory, for whatever value of 'never' applies. And it does apply here. If that memory is needed by a process it can be paged out to swap.
Now if we're talking about my memory starved box from The Closet Of Anxieties ... no, its still a NOT, because I'm not doing anything on such a box that involves big files.
I beg to differ. My current workstation (a Dell Optiplex) has 8 GB; when I bought it two years ago that seemed to be sufficient. Start two or three VM instances, two Eclipses, have Chrome and Firefox running, and some associated programs, and you want to have the rest of those 8 GB available for filesystem buffering -- and not just for /tmp. Add the tendency of programs to place very large files (several GBs) in /tmp, and then you know why I think it's preferable to have /tmp on disk. Btw, I want to use swapping only in dire circumstances and not on a regular base; it affects all running applications and not just those that have content on /tmp. That's also the reason why I think that any file left over in /tmp by an application after its termination is a bug in that application. Applications should clean up after them and should leave temporary files only after crashing. And then they *should* leave them so that one can analyze the situation better... Just my 0.02 € Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org