On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 07:57:23PM +0200, Geert Hendrickx wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 05:38:05PM +0000, Martijn van Buul wrote:
>>> /tmp	If you've got the RAM, some people like to make this a mfs
>>>         (memory filesystem) carved out of RAM.
>>
>> And even if it's not a machine with a lot of RAM, making it a ramdisk is
>> still an interesting thing to do, as long as you make sure it's backed
>> with swapspace. So increase the swapspace with the amount of diskspace
>> you had in mind for /tmp. As long as we don't have tmpfs, a RAMdisk is a
>> lot faster than a softdep filesystem, even if this means the ramdisk
>> needs to be swapped out.
>
> Just a question: how does this work on machines without swap?  

Same as machines with swap.  If you run out of space, bad things can
happen.  Which is why I never make it more than 50% of available RAM.

>> Make sure to set TMPDIR to /tmp, instead of the default /usr/tmp
>
> TMPDIR?  What's that?  What programs use it?  

Lots of programs do, including gcc.  It's where TMP files that get made
and deleted for various reasons get put.  Watch /tmp during a large
compile.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson@bl.org