Disable whatever is cleaning /tmp

[Tim]

On Fri, 2014-04-25 at 10:03 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> No, but IIRC the tmpfs filesystem created and mounted on /tmp is 50%
> of your system RAM. Once that is committed, it's done. It won't use up
> all of your RAM and /tmp won't get any bigger than that, but then
> again half of your available RAM is no longer available for program
> usage.

Seems extreme.  How many temporary files are that big?  Most of the
stuff I see in it are merely a few kilobytes.  However, I agree with the
following, for a particular reason, not just in general (which I do, as
well):
> 
> IMHO using a tmpfs for /tmp is a spectacularly stupid thing to do. How
> it got by the vetting process is beyond me.

Those of us who've gone to burn a CD or DVD, only to have the program
mysteriously fail (i.e. no sane error message was ever shown), because
it wanted to create the ISO in /tmp before it burnt it, but we never had
enough RAM to create an entire ISO file, in the first place.

It strikes me that programs that create small temporary files ought to
be putting them in an appropriate place, perhaps a /tmp that's known to
be in RAM, so long as they can cope with their temporary files
disappearing on them.  But, those things that may need to keep a
temporary file around for a while, ought to be doing it space that's
known to be non-volatile.  And those programs that create large
temporary files ought to be putting them where it's known to be non-RAM,
such as inside /var/spool.

-- 
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