I have loads of RAM and I use very little. I also do record some screencasts with gtk-recordmydesktop
, which by default saves to /tmp
while recording. I assumed that it would mean storing to RAM as much as possible, but then I actually checked and found that /tmp
isn't mounted with tmpfs. Why is that?
Ubuntu – Why doesn’t /tmp use tmpfs
filesystemtmptmpfs
Best Answer
I think you answered your own question. A lot of programs use
/tmp
for storing temporary files, and they can be huge.For example Brasero defaults to that directory to store a CD/DVD's image file, which can be 4.7 GB of size. It's not worth risking a serious slowdown (or a system lockup) in an out of memory situation if your RAM and swap get full.
For advanced users it's no problem to change some applications' defaults and mount
/tmp
astmpfs
. For general use it's just not worth the risk I guess.