Allegedly, on or about 18 November 2016, Robert Nichols sent:
> With /tmp on disk, files are written initially to the buffer cache, and
> get flushed out to disk when something else needs the RAM or,
> eventually, by the automatic push of dirty buffer pages. For the latter
> case, a copy of the data remains in the buffer until something else
> needs that RAM. Short-lived files might spend their entire lives in the
> buffer and never get pushed out to disk.
>
> With /tmp in RAM, files get written to the RAM pages and get pushed out
> to swap when something else needs the RAM.
For a number of years, I'd found that temporary files in /tmp (on disc)
did not get automatically removed, when they should do (programs that
created them didn't erase them, and the regular purge cron job doesn't
remove them). The regular purge cron job is supposed to remove old
files ("old" by a finite number of days), that haven't been *recently*
accessed nor created, so that they don't remove something that may still
be needed, but do automatically remove cruft (cruft that programs really
should have removed by themselves).
To try and resolve that I make sure that I don't browse into /tmp with
programs like Nautilus, and I have gone through *other* configs to make
sure that the /tmp directory doesn't get scanned by indexers (so
*nothing* should be accessing them to make them appear still needed). I
can even reboot, so there should be no programs still holding onto those
files. Yet, I'll still find files that are very old.
Admittedly, I haven't been keeping a close eye on this with the
computers with the newest installations, but the issue had always been
there whenever I looked. I have an old file server still running, that
has some tmp files going back to 2006 (e.g. "mapping-<username>" and
"OSL_PIPE_500_SingleOfficeIPC_<hash>").
But it's that kind of behaviour that makes me loathe to have a
RAM-based /tmp, as it'd just fill up unless I rebooted or manually
deleted things.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is
no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages
posted to the mailing list.
You can't have equality AND special treatment.
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