From: "Nikita V. Youshchenko" <yoush@cs.msu.su>
To: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Subject: Re: Strange situation while writing CDR from iso file on tmpfs
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 22:54:50 +0400
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> 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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