[HEADS-UP] Moving /var/run and /var/lock to tmpfs in Rawhide

[Nicholas Miell]

On 11/23/2010 12:48 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Heya!
> 
> I hereby want to let everybody know that in the next days I will turn on
> /var/run and /var/lock on tmpfs on Rawhide/F15. This is in accordance
> with the following accepted F15 feature:
> 
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/var-run-tmpfs
> 

Is this actually an improvement?

I know that dentries and inodes for regular filesystems can be discarded
from RAM if they're not in use, is that the case for a tmpfs?
How often are the files in /var/run and /var/lock accessed? Is the
kernel likely to discard them?

Files in /var/run tend to be 4 or 5 bytes in length, does that mean they
each use an entire page of RAM or swap? There are vastly fewer swap
pages than there are filesystem blocks, isn't this less efficient?