On Saturday 10 November 2007, Josselin Mouette wrote: > The only case where this will cause trouble is when there isn't enough > swap. In this case, real memory will start to be used for unused pages, > not leaving enough memory for caching files, which can cause giant > performance issues. By default, the tmpfs size is half of that of the > physical, so with our default swap sizes this is unlikely to happen only > because the tmpfs filled the swap. If you want to be safe, maybe you can > increase the minimum swap size from 96 MiB to 128 MiB.
D-I does allow setting up a system without swap and I have seen installation reports where users actually did that. Of course, in most cases that will be on systems with a fair amount of RAM, but maybe it would be a good idea to not set up tmpfs in that case (and just let tmp be part of /). I've also seen some systems will get really heavy tmp usage. If you look at gluck for example, that currently has ~500MB used and I have seen it use the full 2.8GB, mostly because of stale files from various cron jobs and temporary CVS server files. I also must say that I'm not sure if I'd want tmp to use up memory/swap space on the two old Pentium desktops I abuse as servers here at home. Somehow just having /tmp on physical disk just feels safer. For desktop usage, using tmpfs probably makes sense, but for servers? Any idea what other distros do?
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