clean out /tmp?

[Michael A. Peters]

On Mon, 2005-09-26 at 23:57 +0100, James Wilkinson wrote:
> Michael A. Peters wrote:
> > Nothing in /tmp should be expected to survive a reboot.
> > In fact, some people like to run /tmp as a tempfs (temporary file
> > system) - only problem is, a tempfs can get full if you aren't careful.
> 
> So can a regular /tmp.
> 
> Modern tmpfs uses both memory and swap-space, depending on "memory
> pressure" (whether the kernel thinks it has a better use for real memory
> than using it for a particular tmpfs page). It has a
> sysadmin-configurable maximum size: "the default is half of your
> physical RAM without swap", but you can dynamically change that.

Yeah - for the desktop user though, if you are doing a lot of
downloading it can end up being a real pain if your download agent
uses /tmp and suddenly you lose the download because your tempfs ran out
of space.

For desktops, I think it really is best for /tmp to be part of your root
logical volume group.

That being said - when I did sysadmin work, both /tmp and /var/run were
tempfs (/var/run was tempfs for faster access to lock/pid files - and
given a reboot after kernel update, you would never have stale pids
blocking a service. How much of a difference it really made, I haven't a
clue. Just what I was taught by dad - but it may not matter these days).
Running /var/run on tempfs is a bit tricky in RH though, after it mounts
you have to create directory structure that certain init scripts will
expect to be there.