On Fri, 25 May 2012 21:56:55 -0400 Ted Ts'o <ty...@mit.edu> wrote: > > The major difference is that tmpfs pages only get written out to swap > when the system is under memory pressure. In contrast, pages which > are backed by a filesystem will start being written to disk after 30 > seconds _or_ if the system is under memory pressure. >
I still think the major difference is that page cache -> ext2 can be quota'd while tmpfs -> swap cannot (AFAIK; has that changed in the past couple of years?). This may be good or bad depending on your use case. > > And if you consider how much memory most desktop/laptops have, and how > often people **really** are downloading multi-gigabyte files to /tmp > (note that browsers tend to default downloads to ~/Downloads) Browsers write files to ~/Downloads (or ~/Desktop) *when the user selects "Save As"*. On Iceweasel and Chrome at least, if you click a link to a content-type the browser cannot natively display, it downloads it to /tmp while it's waiting for you to tell it what to do with it. These files can be arbitrarily large. Weldon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120526073853.d0868690.wel...@b.rontosaur.us
