[nrdvana]

The third mitigating feature the article forgot to mention is that tmpfs can get paged out to the swap partition. If you drop a large file there and forget it, it will all end up in the swap partition if applications are demanding more memory.

[m463]

what swap partition?

I meant this sort of jokingly. I think have a few linux systems that were never configured with swap partitions or swapfiles.

[edoceo]

I'm with you. I don't swap. Processes die. OOM. Linux can recover and not lose data. Just unavailable for a moment.

[guappa]

Fedora did this long before debian. I remember doing wget of an .iso file on /tmp and my entire wayland session being killed by the OOM killer.

I still think it's a terrible idea.

[nolist_policy]

Use `/var/tmp` of you want a disk backed tmp.

[buckle8017]

Which is a great reason to have a big swap file now.

[gnyman]

Note though that if you don't have swap now, and enable it, you introduce the risk of thrashing [1]

If you have swap already it doesn't matter, but I've encountered enough thrashing that I now disable swap on almost all servers I work with.

It's rare but when it happens the server usually becomes completely unresponsive, so you have to hard reset it. I'd rather that the application trying to use too much memory is killed by the oom manager and I can ssh in and fix that.

[1] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...