Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 12 Aug 1997 19:18:48 -0700 (PDT) | From | Darin Johnson <> | Subject | Re: Memory Management - BSD vs Linux |
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> From: Mike Shaver <shaver@neon.ingenia.ca> > > Until someone creates a _huge_ file in /tmp (as my users are wont to > do) and all of the sudden you're low on memory. > > Or when your MOO/database/rendering eats up piles of memory and > sendmail can't create temp files and starts rejecting mail. > > Colour me unimpressed with tmpfs.
Actually I was thinking of writing something like this. Of course, I *was* going to allow minimum free tmp and swap, so cases like this don't happen. Of course, one can always run out of tmp or swap without tmpfs; if tmpfs size was the old tmp size plus the old swap size, why would there be less space?
The BSD method is simplest; it uses a RAM based device, that is stored a separate process's address space, and you build a file system on top of that. However, I was thinking of doing the file system directly rather than using a device, as this should be faster (but it's hard to say, the caches keep things fast enough, which removesy one of the main reasons to use tmpfs).
The advantages are mostly in system setup and configuration (yeah, as someone mentioned earlier about swap files that grow; a well configured system won't need it, but Linux has never had a prerequisite of being an expert admin). You can have a smaller root partition that won't fill up, you can overestimate the size of the swap partition without actually wasting disk (yeah, someone will pipe in and say disks are cheap, but so am I), etc. And if you don't like it, don't use (probably not as good an idea on a multi user machine).
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