81–90 of 137 posts
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Fedora did this long before debian. I remember doing wget of an .iso file on /tmp and my entire wayland session being killed by the OOM killer. I still think it's a terrible idea.
Use `/var/tmp` of you want a disk backed tmp.
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I run a script that rotates my /tmp/ each day, so I can access yesterday's tmp files at /tmp/20250828/ and so on. My /tmp is my default folder for downloads and temporary work. It will grow 100GB+ easily.
Sure, but note that your usecase goes specifically against fhs and posix specs: >Programs must not assume that any files or directories in /tmp are preserved between invocations of the program. >Although data stored in /tmp may be deleted in a site-specific manner, it is recommended that files and directories located in /tmp be deleted whenever the system is booted. https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch…
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what swap partition? I meant this sort of jokingly. I think have a few linux systems that were never configured with swap partitions or swapfiles.
I'm with you. I don't swap. Processes die. OOM. Linux can recover and not lose data. Just unavailable for a moment.
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Note though that if you don't have swap now, and enable it, you introduce the risk of thrashing [1] If you have swap already it doesn't matter, but I've encountered enough thrashing that I now disable swap on almost all servers I work with. It's rare but when it happens the server usually becomes completely unresponsive, so you have to hard reset it. I'd rather that the application trying to use too much memory is ki…
Disabling swap on servers is de-facto standard for serious deployments. The swap story needs a serious upgrade. I think /tmp in memory is a great idea, but I also think that particular /tmp needs a swap support (ideally with compression, ZSWAP), but not the main system.
- for most processes no SWAP
- for tmpfs, use RAM until a quota
- for tmpfs, start using a swapfile above that quota
Why this change? Writing to it will be faster than disk but idk if am is a precious commodity I’d rather it was just a part of the disk I was writing to.
It's a dumb idea that came from the systemd people. They've never explained properly why it's a good idea, but it's the systemd default and for some reason distros defer to that.
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Use `/var/tmp` of you want a disk backed tmp.
I thought /var/tmp is for applications while /tmp is for the user.
> The place for small temporary files. This directory is usually mounted as a tmpfs instance, and should hence not be used for larger files. (Use /var/tmp/ for larger files.) This directory is usually flushed at boot-up. Also, files that are not accessed within a certain time may be automatically deleted.
Source: https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/linux_file_syste...
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Who runs around with a 100gb+ /tmp partition? Our default server images come with a 4.4GB /tmp partition...
I run a script that rotates my /tmp/ each day, so I can access yesterday's tmp files at /tmp/20250828/ and so on. My /tmp is my default folder for downloads and temporary work. It will grow 100GB+ easily.
So 99.9% of the users + you benefit from the change. I'm sure there are people that really rely on unconventional usages, but they are silent atm.
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It's a dumb idea that came from the systemd people. They've never explained properly why it's a good idea, but it's the systemd default and for some reason distros defer to that.
Not at all. tmpfs precedes systemd for like a decade.
It was a bad idea on Solaris too, but at least back in those days the trade-off between RAM and disk storage was very different from today now we have NVME drives and such.
I'm surprised to discover that it was not already the case for a long time for tmpfs to be used for /tmp, and that change is nice. But the auto-cleanup feature looks awful to me. Be it desktop or servers, machine with uptime of more than a year, I never saw the case of tmp being filled just by forgotten garbage. Only sometimes filled by unzipping a too big file or something like that. But it is on the spot. It used t…
> I never saw the case of tmp being filled just by forgotten garbage. It might have more to do with the type of developers I've worked with, but it happens all the time. Monitoring complains and you go into check, and there it is gigabytes of junk dumped there by shitty software or scripts that can't cleanup after themselves. The issue is that you don't always knows what's safe to delete, if you're the operations per…
Using the example from the article, extracting an archive. Surely that use case is entity not possible using in-memory? What happens if you're dealing with a not-unreasonable 100gb archive? Who runs around with 100gb+ of swap?!
Use `/var/tmp` of you want a disk backed tmp. Not sure why the article omits that.