/tmp on tmpfs

[Chris Murphy]

On Apr 3, 2012, at 9:48 AM, M A Young wrote:

> On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Chris Adams wrote:
> 
>> Also, if some user has taken up lots of space in /tmp, you can LART the user and delete the files; that's no different than a user filling up a partition by writing to /tmp (no reboot necessary in either case).
> 
> That assumes your system is still functional enough to allow you to do that. In a low memory/high swap situation, which this could easily trigger, logging in and clearing the files could be very slow, and the login process could time out before you get logged in.

If it's limited to 1/2 RAM*, even if it's the primary cause of a low memory situation it shouldn't cause thrashing. If it does cause thrashing, it's the source of it, and would happen if /tmp were on disk.


* I still think that default is excessive. But that's more impression than based on merit.