/tmp on tmpfs

[John]

Steve McIntyre wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>
It would be a disaster for me. I often create ISOs there because they 
won't be kept for long. I don't have a DVD burner on  yet, but a 
dual-layer burner is on my shopping list.

A problem I've had on 2.2 and 2.4 (I've not put 2.6 to the test yet) is 
having my GUI paged out to swap when I copy large files (or lots of 
files). The files get cached at the expense of the GUI and performance 
falls off for a while after the copy's done.

Using tmpfs would make this worse.