[vserver] Suggestion: don't mount 16 MB tmpfs into /tmp per default

From: Patrick Nagel <patrick.nagel_at_star-group.net>
Date: Wed 14 May 2008 - 08:30:55 BST
Message-Id: <200805141530.59119.patrick.nagel@star-group.net>

Hi,

I'd like to suggest removing (or commenting out) the line

'none /tmp tmpfs size=16m,mode=1777 0 0'

from the default /etc/vservers/<vserver>/fstab.

I ran into trouble with this default setting twice.
Once I tried to build OpenOffice - the build process needs huge amounts of
space in /tmp, so it failed. The other time was yesterday / today when
dovecot's LDA couldn't temporarily store mails in /tmp because of
insufficient space (see my posting on the Dovecot mailing list:
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2008-May/030719.html).

I brought up this topic on the IRC channel, and got the information that "if
you have 100+ guests, each with 5 processes banging on /tmp for extremely
short temporary storage, you definitely want that to be in memory not on your
main disk" (read the full conversation: `curl -s
http://irc.13thfloor.at/LOG/2008-05/LOG_2008-05-14.txt | grep -A
20 "^1210736428"`).

In my opinion, this default setting has too much potential of causing
(sometimes hard-to-debug) trouble. The few Linux-VServer users who run 100+
installations should be able to figure out on their own that they should put
guest's /tmp into a ramdisk, if a lot of accesses to /tmp cause performance
issues.

Patrick.

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Received on Wed May 14 08:31:15 2008
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