Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 20:14:16 +0100 (BST)
From: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
To: "Nikita V. Youshchenko" <yoush@cs.msu.su>
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Strange situation while writing CDR from iso file on tmpfs
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On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Nikita V. Youshchenko wrote:
> 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?

I think it's unusual for a machine with 256M of RAM to use more
than ~512M for swap, but I certainly wouldn't advise you against it.
If you've plenty of spare disk, and you find that sometimes it is
almost all useful for swap, keep it that way.  But I can't pretend
that tmpfs is efficient compared with other filesystems once it
gets into using swap.

> 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?

Sorry, you'll know much more about configuring such systems than I do.

Hugh

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