* Ireland Rick (Rick.Ireland@irs.gov) [011127 05:06]:
A fellow administrator of mine has his systems' /tmp directory mounted on a swap partition. It is causing odd behavior of several non-critical functions, but seems to be working. My question is, what benefit (if any) would such an arrangement have in Linux - or any Unix derivative?
This is normal on Solaris and others but with disk space being as cheap as it is now it's. There are performance benefits on some some filesystems/systems that aren't clever about how deleted dirty buffers are handled but afaik this doesn't effect Linux. It also requires that you are pretty careful with you quotas on /tmp and ulimits on vm to keep people from filling up /tmp and crashing the machine. This has been discussed a lot (by people who actually know about this stuff ;)) on the linux-kernel mailinglist. You may want to look through the archives if you are interested in it. (There's got to be a joke about ulimits or vm and the IRS but it escapes me at the moment). -- -ckm