On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 12:17:21PM -0800, John Hardin wrote: > I'm unfamiliar with SunOS. What is "swap" and why it is mounted on > /tmp? Seeing something called "swap" mounted as a real filesystem is > making me twitch. Is that some sort of ramdisk?
It's the Solaris tmpfs. Surplus virtual memory is mounted as swap. While the system has plenty of memory left, it's effectively a ramdisk. Only when memory usage goes up does it use some paging area on your hard disks. This makes /tmp very fast in normal circumstances. Disadvantage: Unless you limit the maximum size of /tmp, a runaway process writing to /tmp can fill up your swap space. (Similar to the way a runaway process allocating memory can fill it up, but of course it's another path to doom...) Regards, Marc
