[vox-tech] Three Install Questions

[Josh Parsons]

On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 12:11 -0800, Ken Herron wrote:

> The idea is to use tmpfs for your /tmp directory. tmpfs is a filesystem 
> that uses virtual memory for data storage,...
> Solaris uses this technique by default.

I remember reading somewhere that "empirical tests show" that because of
the efficiency of the ext3 filesystem, there's no speed advantage to
using tmpfs for /tmp. Of course after 5 seconds, anything in /tmp will
get written to disk under ext3, but then on a busy system things that
stay in tmpfs for more than a few seconds without being accessed will be
swapped anyway.  The comparison with Solaris was explicitly mentioned,
and it got a beating for its slow disk filesystem performance.

I quite understand all the reasons you mention why tmpfs could be
superior, but maybe you'd like to experiment to see if it's really
making a difference?

-- 
Josh Parsons
Philosophy Department
1238 Social Sciences and Humanities Bldg.
University of California
Davis, CA 95616-8673
USA

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