Re: beta3 Solaris 7 (SPARC) port report

On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 09:47:16PM +0100, Frank Joerdens wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 12:04:40PM -0800, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> [ . . . ]
> > > for the /tmp directory, which looks distinctly odd to me. What kind of
> > > device is swap (I know what swap is normally but I didn't know you could
> > > mount stuff there . . . )??
> >
> > That is a tmpfs file system which uses swap space for /tmp storage.
> > Both swap usage and /tmp compete for the same partition on the disk.
> > If you have a lot of swapping programs, you don't get to put much in
> > /tmp. If you have a lot of files in /tmp, you don't get to run many
> > programs.
> >
> > As far as I can recall, this is a Sun specific thing.
> >
> > It's a reasonable idea on a stable system. It's a pretty crummy idea
> > on a development system, or one with unpredictable loads. My
> > experience is that either something goes crazy and fills up /tmp and
> > then you can't run anything else and you have to reboot, or something
> > goes crazy and fills up swap and then you can't write any /tmp files
> > and daemon processes start to silently die and you have to reboot.
>
> Very peculiar, or crummy, indeed. This is system is not used by anyone
> else besides myself at the moment (cuz it's just being built up), as far
> a I can tell, and is ludicrously overpowered (3 CPUs, 768 MB RAM) for
> the mundane uses I am subjecting it to (installing and testing
> Postgresql).

I doubt you can blame any problems on tmpfs, here. tmpfs has been
in Solarix for many years, and has had plenty of time to stabilize.
With 768M of RAM and running only PG you not using any swap space at
all, and unix sockets don't use any appreciable space either, so the
conflicts Ian describes are impossible in your case.

Nathan Myers
ncm(at)zembu(dot)com