8.0-RELEASE -> -STABLE and size of /

[Clifton Royston]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 12:21:48PM -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 09:04:57PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> > Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
...
> > And why so big /tmp? I am running servers with smaller sizes for years
> > without any problem.
> 
> My recommendation above doesn't imply those who don't use it will have
> problems -- each environment/system is different.
> 
> That said, it's amazing how much software out there blindly uses /tmp.
> Last year I ran into this situation: an older server (1GB /tmp) started
> behaving oddly due to /tmp filling.  A user of the system was using lynx
> to download some large files (an ISO image and something else, I forget
> what).  lynx saves data its downloading to /tmp, and once it completes,
> the user is prompted where to save the data (CWD being the default).

  Another example: the stock /usr/bin/sort uses /tmp for its temporary
storage when it needs to start using disk.

  You can redirect that via -T if you think ahead and realize that it's
going to be a problem, but if you are just whipping up a quick shell
script and later happen to run it on much bigger inputs than you were
expecting you can run out of space on /.  (Yes, that happened to me
fairly recently on several systems, when some log files weren't being
rotated on schedule.)

  An alternative solution is to symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, which I've
done on many systems, assuming that nothing in the /etc/rc sequence
will need /tmp before filesystems are mounted.  (I suppose putting it
on its own filesystem also assumes that.)

  In general, I think you've got a good idea and I plan to start
adopting that in the future.

  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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