Subject: Re: [vserver] Suggestion: don't mount 16 MB tmpfs into /tmp per default
From: Jason Drage <jasond@ibsglobalweb.com>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 09:58:42 +1000

Hi Patrick,
I've also run into problems here too so I agree that it should not be
the default (perhaps we vserver users need a formal way to vote on such
propositions?)

FWIW it's relatively easy to wrap your vserver build process with a
script that overwrites the fstab with saner defaults.

cheers
-- Jason

Patrick Nagel wrote:
> 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.
>
>