On 06/01/2012 12:21 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
I think most of the noise in this flame thread is due to a
misunderstanding how modern memory management works and the assumption
that having an explicit size limit on /tmp was a bad thing, even though
it actually is a good thing... In fact, we need much stronger limits
than what tmpfs currently provides: per-user limits on the usage of
/tmp. But that's something for the future...

Lennart


I understand how memory management works...which is why this seems like a terrible idea.

Can you provide numbers that show that there is a speed increase with this scheme which offsets the amount of change required to do this? I haven't seen anything other than "its faster".

This is change is troublesome for multiple reasons:
* It switches the semantics of what /tmp is. Its now apparently for small and short-lived files. Where small and short-lived are defined based on the RAM usage at the time a file is created. Hooray for heisenbugs! * everything that did use /tmp now should use /var/tmp which means patching a ton of programs and hoping that third party applications do the same thing. So the "problem" this fixes with /tmp now exists in /var/tmp.
* there are no numbers which back up the purported benefits
* file data gets moved out of RAM (in this case, to swap) not when it is convenient for the kernel at a potentially idle time but when the kernel is experiencing memory pressure. * changing the amount of space available in /tmp means screwing with swap files

How is this change a win?


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