Re: Strange situation while writing CDR from iso file on tmpfs

From: Nikita V. Youshchenko
Date: Wed Sep 03 2003 - 14:21:16 EST


> tmpfs is fine while everything is in memory, and even when a little
> overflowed to swap; but with so much on swap it's at the mercy of the
> vagaries of the LRU lists, and swap allocation might work out far
> from optimal for it. tmpfs use of swap is not something we've ever
> tried to optimize for.

Hmm...
Until today I thought that it is a good administration style to create a
several gigabyte swap partition (which is normally almost unused, but
just for the case that some program needs much virtual memory), and use
tmpfs for /tmp.
I thought that it is good for two reasons - disk space is not wasted for
/tmp (and /tmp still has several gigabytes of space), and short-living
temporary files such as gcc intermediate files normally reside in memory,
which is more effective than using a filesystem on a disk.

If I understand you correctly, the above is not true at least for a
desktop system with 256M of RAM?

And what about LTSP server with 2 gigabytes of RAM (and 6 gigabytes of
swap) that normally runs 10-15 KDE sessions with mozilla's and
openoffice's?

> Perhaps something exceptionally stupid and avoidable occurs, I'll keep
> your mail as reminder to investigate some day.

Thank you.

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