Ram & swap, Was: [H-GEN] Linux & NTFS

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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"James C. McPherson" <James.McPherson at Sun.COM> writes:

> On Tue, 17 Dec 2002 14:55:40 +1000 (EST) Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org> wrote:
> > limit the size of /tmp so it isn't as large as swap.  Under Linux set the
> > size= mount option on /tmp.  Here is my /tmp line from /etc/fstab:
> > swap            /tmp    tmpfs           defaults,size=1024m     0       0

> For the sunray server which I'm using at the moment we actually have
> a minimal /tmp and all those pesky temporary files are in /var/tmp
> instead, along with netscape / mozilla cache directories. Seems to
> work well enough for this branch.

James, it's not clear from reading this whether or not you'd recommend
mounting /var/tmp as tmpfs, and this set me wondering if that could be
a good idea on my system at home.

I tend to leave /tmp alone and have system and application software
use it for short-term stuff.  I don't care that it gets cleaned on a
reboot.  On the other hand, /var/tmp gets a *lot* more use since I
like to compile packages there from time to time instead of under my
home directory (which may well be a bad idea since /var/tmp is on the
root partition on this system).

On the one hand I can see that it might be a waste to expand mount
/tmp as tmpfs when I'm using only 388KB of it right now; and on the
other it would be nice to free up more space on / (which includes /usr
and /var) by making /var/tmp a tmpfs filesystem, but on the gripping
hand I'd hate to forget and try to compile a large project in that
space (running out of swap and memory---ick!).

Any ideas from the list?
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