/tmp on tmpfs

[Steve McIntyre]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 07:50:17AM +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
>
>I know this is a discussion for Hoary, but nonetheless I'm curious, how 
>can this be a good thing when RAM is your best ticket to performance?
>
>What happens when you fire up a RAM-intensive app, like a database?

A lot of applications read and write temporary files all the time, so
writing those files into memory rather than disk is a big win. If
something really starts using lots of RAM, the contents of the tmpfs
will be flushed to swap just like anything else.

It's a trade-off, like many of these things. Sun started using tmpfs
as a default quite a while ago in Solaris, and _generally_ it's faster
for _most_ people. There will be users and situations where it's not,
of course.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve at einval.com
We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
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