[362] in netbsd-help mailing list archive
Re: /tmp fills up all the time
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Mon Oct 16 00:42:17 1995
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 00:42:02 -0400
To: Gunnar W Hoest <gwhoest@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Yoav Yerushalmi <yoav@MIT.EDU>, netbsd-help@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[361] in netbsd-help mailing list archive"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
> the problem is that the default setup uses the mfs system
> for tmp, but only gives it about 2 megs. (mfs is the memory
> file system, which means that /tmp is actually stored in
> swap, thereby optimizing it considerably for short-term files,
> which is what tmp is supposed to be for).
This is not necesarily the root of the problem. Since your machine
only has 16 megabytes of memory, increasing the amount of swap devoted
to an mfs is likely to have deleterious performance impact on your
system (the whole mfs is not used kept in memory, but the kernel
tries to do so).
> Anyway, to fix it, check how much swap you have:
[...]
Under modern operating systems, like NetBSD, /tmp is not intended to
be used for large files. Instead, you should be using /var/tmp for
such storage.
Of course, it may not be clear to you what application is causing the
problem, and it may not be trivial to correct it.
For instance, matlab and xess are currently misconfigured to store
large files in /tmp -- that's being fixed, but until it is you might
experience this problem.
So anyway, you might consider seeing what's taking up space in /tmp
(i.e. ls -l /tmp; du -a /tmp) and see if those applications which
are causing the problem can be shifted to /var/tmp.
It may be necessary to increase the space in /tmp as a temporary
measure, but that should not be necessary in the long term.
--jhawk@mit.edu
John Hawkinson
