On 04/03/2012 10:31 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
/tmp is a like a litter box. From a user perspective, I'm happy to have it emptied regularly, because clearly the cats don't clean up their own doodles. That one of the cats might think he's deposited something valuable that he'll come back for someday, is hilarious to me, as well as ridiculous.
My only concern about it being on tmpfs instead of on disk, is how big it could get, how much memory could be held hostage, until there's a reboot. I'd rather see it be both size and age limited (each item has a decay rate or something), so that it's evacuated more regularly than just between reboots - which could be months.
Indeed. I don't mind the cleaning of /tmp on reboots although I'm going
to have to warn my users.
I've got two concerns about this change:
* The (user|program) has to decide the location for temporary data based
on its size. There have been arguments that everyone should have been
using /var/tmp for ages but I'm not buying it. I suppose that made
sense when there were separate /var and / partitions, but that hasn't
been the case _ever_ for me on Linux and its been a long time since I
did that on other platforms.
* The competition for space between things in /tmp and VM. When someone
abuses space in /tmp (on purpose or not) then the system is going to
start swapping and performance is going to suffer and the common
response for fixing it will end up being 'just reboot'. That's just gross.
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I've not seen a convincing case on why this
has to be made the default rather than an opt-in situation. I certainly
can't see this being a configuration I'd choose for my servers or any
machine which may be memory limited.
Chris Murphy
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