how big does /tmp need to be?

[Derek Broughton]

Rashkae wrote:

> Brian McKee wrote:
> 
>> People create partitions for other reasons too.
>> 
>> One is some kind of performance/disk size issues - e.g. /tmp is on a
>> separate faster drive, or it's local when all your other partitions
>> are NFS mounted.
>> 
>> Another reason I can think of is keeping the system up when you run
>> out of space.
>> For instance, if you have /var/log on a separate partition, and
>> something runs wild with logging filling that partition, the system
>> stays up and running.  If it's all in one partition then you're hosed.
>>  I could see that argument for having /tmp on it's own.
>> 
>> Lastly if you like playing with file system types - e.g. you use ext3
>> for / and xfs for /tmp because you know you do transcoding projects in
>> /tmp all the time and muck with big files.
>> 
>> I suppose the note I should add to my original +1 comment is use LVM
>> and then it's easy to change later.
> 
> Note self, think 5 minutes before posting.. Thanks ;)

LOL.  I have to admit, I didn't think about things like video. _video_ never
goes to /tmp on my system.  Specifically because it always wants to use a
lot more space than I have in /tmp.

I used to make a really, really, big swap partition, and put /tmp in tmpfs
(ie, it uses part of the swap).  Then I figured I wasn't really wasting
space.  But Ubuntu bollixed that and I never got around to fixing it.
-- 
derek