On Mar 23, Joel Reicher wrote
> If that's the case, then what's the advantage in doing it? I've always been
> curious about this because AFAICT that's not different to choosing a larger
> size for the partition you would have otherwise had /tmp on, and decreasing
> your swap partition by the same amount.
> 
> I guess one can be more easily reconfigured than the other, but is there
> another advantage?
> 

An MFS file system is actually acting like any user-level process: it can have
some pages moved to swap space if needed.
That is, if you have a 50Mb MFS, but use only 2Mb on it, the VM system will
flush the unused pages to the swap partition if some RAM is needed for other
user processes.
Is a MFS /tmp faster or slower than a on-disk filesystem depends on
how much RAM you have and how you use it. On an average workstation with at
last 64Mb RAM it is a win.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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