Frank Joerdens <frank@joerdens.de> writes:
> I just typed
>
> $ mount
>
> and I get
>
> /tmp on swap read/write/setuid on Mon Jan 22 16:39:32 2001
>
> for the /tmp directory, which looks distinctly odd to me. What kind of
> device is swap (I know what swap is normally but I didn't know you could
> mount stuff there . . . )??
That is a tmpfs file system which uses swap space for /tmp storage.
Both swap usage and /tmp compete for the same partition on the disk.
If you have a lot of swapping programs, you don't get to put much in
/tmp. If you have a lot of files in /tmp, you don't get to run many
programs.
As far as I can recall, this is a Sun specific thing.
It's a reasonable idea on a stable system. It's a pretty crummy idea
on a development system, or one with unpredictable loads. My
experience is that either something goes crazy and fills up /tmp and
then you can't run anything else and you have to reboot, or something
goes crazy and fills up swap and then you can't write any /tmp files
and daemon processes start to silently die and you have to reboot.
Ian