3 ms·
> Now I'm to give 50% of this up, having those buffers/cache flushed for... someone unarchiving a tarball?! Nope, unarchiving tarballs doesn't write the tarbal
by bildung 2y ago
> Now I'm to give 50% of this up, having those buffers/cache flushed for... someone unarchiving a tarball?!
Nope, unarchiving tarballs doesn't write the tarball content to /tmp.
> It smacks of people with desktops, with enormous amounts of free RAM, making decisions for servers.
* Servers usually have way more RAM than desktop devices? Unless you mean VMs, in which case the VM can't decide what device /tmp lies in anyway.
* in any case it will be trivial to just not use it for your servers, if you prefer /tmp to be on disk. Just like I already used tmpfs for 2 decades in Debian, it is a single line in /etc/fstab either way.
- b112 2y agoEh? Yes, if I untar a file in /tmp, it will go there. My whole post talks about putting files in tmp! And this change is a performance killer for that reason. Taking all that juicy, super fast RAM away from system caches and buffers, which yes is a performance killer. You want sensible defaults. Telling people they can change a dumb default to something smart, isn't a viable response. I mean my god, you say you've been using linux for 20+ years, so you surely know, doing this for a performance gain is absurd! We have mega fast SSDs, and an elegant filesystem layer, writing to disk is immensely fast compared to spinning disk days. We gain almost nothing here, and lose RAM caching of libraries, data, buffers, which the kernel is very, very good at these days too. It's a dumb default. Immensely so! And statement like "you can just" aren't the point. This slows almost every single system down. You know, this could be done right. Instead of stomping on everyone, just create a new tmpfs for just this purpose. Let people use it if they want. And why on earth suddenly start forcing file cleaning. Debian has not had that default in decades, changing it now because someone else called redhat does it, isn't a valid excuse. Debian doesn't need to be more like redhat.