On Aug 31, 2005, at 1:57 PM, Geert Hendrickx wrote:
>> 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?

Just fine, so long as you've got enough RAM so that everything fits.   
Most users of /tmp don't require much space, just very quick access  
to small temporary files.

If you plan to put hundreds of MB into /tmp, and your system working  
set is similiarly large, then it behooves you to either have 512+ MB  
of RAM, or to set up swap space as needed.

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

It's an environment variable that many programs pay attention to, in  
order to decide where to put temporary files.  It defaults to /tmp if  
not set, generally.

-- 
-Chuck