/tmp: how large is needed?

phoenixhou · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2010 Posts: 26

I installed Gentoo on my laptop for everyday use, mainly document processing, web surfing, watching movies, etc.

Following the Handbook, I allocated 2GB of disk space for /tmp. As I could observe, space usage on /tmp never exceeded 10%. I'm wondering exactly how much space is needed for /tmp in my situation, or if a separate /tmp is necessary at all.

What application, or for example which software package, will use /tmp intensively?
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Rexilion · Veteran Joined: 17 Mar 2009 Posts: 1044

Mine is not big too, might it might grow to enormous sizes if some programs start putting a lot of stuff there. I don't know exactly when that happens, but in the meantime you could use 512 MB for it and get away with that. I use that size, and it was never too small.

One example I can think of, is that this size is used by firefox to temporarily store files for later opening. If you donload big .rar files, then that partition should be big too.

dE_logics · Advocate Joined: 02 Jan 2009 Posts: 2253 Location: $TERM

If you're making temporary images of DVD's it's a good ideal to have it like...10 GB, for advanced video editing I recommend 20 GB, for HD video editing, I can't be below a 100 GB.

Overall I don't think it makes sense to mount a whole partition onto it since it will waste space, instead mounting that additional space to your root partition will be more conservative.

The places in which you are recommended to mount a partition is the /usr, /usr/lib64, /usr/portage and/or /usr/portage/distfiles (/usr/portage/distfiles will work great at jfs but /usr/portage will be good with reiserfs) and maybe the desktop folder or the home folder as a whole since people tend to use the desktop quiet often.
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Sven Vermeulen · Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 10:14 am Post subject:

It's a good idea to watch the file usage in /tmp. After a while, I decided it wasn't a bad idea to use tmpfs for /tmp (which uses virtual memory, so creates an empty /tmp after every reboot anyhow) and never really had an issue with that decision.

Like the filesystem hierarchy standard sais, /tmp is for temporary information of running processes. Any temporary information that should survive a process' lifetime should be in /var/tmp or, if it is ran by a general user, in a temporary folder in his home directory...
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Genone · Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 2:41 pm Post subject:

The main reason for using a separate partition is security: As /tmp is world-writable it's a good idea to have it mounted nosuid, nodev and noexec.
As for size, in most cases even 100MB should be enough. Unfortunately there are a couple applications that use /tmp to store huge amounts of transient data, so there is no value that's sufficient in all cases. Though with luck those apps repect the TMPDIR variable, so you could redirect them to another location if you run into troubles.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

I'm pretty sure that portage uses /var/tmp by default, so you will certainly
need a fair amount of space on /var (?10G). Since var has a lot of news
and mail and portage files coming and going I tend to put it on a separate
partition, but I've never bothered to do that with /tmp, and it's never used
much space - certainly less than 1G.

Will