[ale] A modest proposal for the times

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

>Why not make /tmp, $HOME/.cache and others a tmpfs? I've done that for
years without a lick of trouble. Blazingly fast, >saves the flash, and
everything goes away on shutdown or reboot.

I think a lot of the decision depends on your specific load and how you
manage it.   RAM is used for all sorts of things and even though 64 GB
sounds like a lot, you could end up with thrashing between the different
uses.

The other thing that has been happening over the years is that methods of
doing things also changes.   Years ago interprocess locks were often
implemented by creating a tmp file, usually with a "." in front of it so it
was invisible, opening it, then "deleting" the file (which would not
actually be deleted until it was closed.   If you could not create a file
of the same name, you knew the process was "locked".   This gave way to
more sensible methods of creating locks through system calls.

md

On Thu, Apr 10, 2025 at 12:27 PM Wayne via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

>
> Why not make /tmp, $HOME/.cache and others a tmpfs? I've done that for
> years without a lick of trouble. Blazingly fast, saves the flash, and
> everything goes away on shutdown or reboot.
>
>
> On 4/10/25 9:13 AM, Steve Litt via Ale wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 10 Apr 2025 03:28:11 -0400
> > "Jon \"maddog\" Hall" <jon.maddog.hall at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Steve,
> >>
> >> Do you swap that much?  If so I would recommend much more RAM.
> >
> > When I put my computer together in 2020, 64GB RAM seemed like plenty.
> > But I'm not good at housekeeping my browser tabs and other windows, so
> > somethines the thing starts thrashing. I recently installed adblock,
> > which helped a bunch, but then I just left more tabs open :-)
> >
> > So tghe root cause is defective user.
> >
> >> Also consider putting your system files on the NVMe including all of
> >> your /tmp and /use/tmp files.
> >
> > The entire /usr tree is already on the NVMe. I'll try putting /tmp
> > there. Thanks!
> >
> > SteveT
> >
> > Steve Litt
> > Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
> > Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
> >
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