Actually, you can make tempfs use more than half your memory by passing the right options in /etc/fstab. You could also make it use less than half of your memory this way. For example, if you want to have /tmp forced to 32MB regardless of how much memory you have, the following line would do that. /dev/shm /tmp tmpfs size=32m 0 0 Of course, the danger is, if you specify more memory than your total RAM plus swap, you risk crashing your system. That's why the default is half of your physical RAM. It is a safety precaution.
