Fedora 18 Will Stick To Using Tmpfs

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

And since Flash is proprietary, not much can be done about it (unless you switch to Gnash/Lightspark).

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Edit the binary and replace every instance of "/tmp/" with "/flv/"? ;)

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

That's pretty clever. I typically don't need that when dealing with YouTube, as VLC can open its streams directly, but it's an interesting way of doing it for unsupported websites.

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The weird thing is: Youtube vids work smooth on this box (this is the only known exception to me), albeit on low quality.

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

Oh, so you mean that you'd rather save some disk space while sacrificing some RAM if possible, but if not, have it write to disk? But then doesn't that happen already when using tmpfs with a swap partition/file?

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No, it's not a space issue. Compared to the previous OS that was preinstalled on this box, Ubuntu is using about 20% (probably even less) for it's OS data files.

It's not an issue that data will (eventually) be written to disk. If I keep my tmpfs @ 25%, there is a very small chance data will be written to disk unless an OOM situation occurs. So it will only happen if some program starts eating insane amounts of RAM. When this box is booted, it uses about 125MB of RAM.

And I don't mind if it starts swapping pages to disk. It's just undesirable since the system becames somewhat unresponsive when said situation occurs if memory runs out.

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

And of course, the trick is not nice, but then your case is fairly isolated. There are few people with old PCs that use tmpfs and watch Flash videos. And since Flash is proprietary, not much can be done about it (unless you switch to Gnash/Lightspark).

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Using tmpfs as /tmp is not the default for Ubuntu (if I'm not mistaken), so that is a valid point.

Aside from that, I don't agree with my usecase being isolated. If you google the bugreports of SSE2 being used in Adobe Flash player (for Linux only(!)). You will see many, many, many bugreports on Ubuntu Launchpad and on Adobe's own website (Bugbase or something?). So that implies that many people are still using old HW for this exact purpose.

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Originally Posted by Rexilion

The fact that you two are thinking it's a viable solution suprises me. Moving around important pieces of infrastructure, just to get a browser plugin functioning under every circumstance and to use a TMP variable that points to a tmpfs fs, is not a good idea.

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"moving around" is a bit of an overstatement considering any sane program doesnt hardcode /tmp/foo/bar/ it does $TMPDIR/foo/bar so it really doesnt matter where $TMPDIR resides, you could point it at a 777 folder under /home if you really wanted to do. The same goes for "viable solution" <--- overstatement. I dont think its a viable solution, its a hack plain and simple but considering we cant patch and recompile flash...our options are limited.

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Originally Posted by GreatEmerald

But then doesn't that happen already when using tmpfs with a swap partition/file?

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tmpfs can go to swap, so this is what happens.
Hence, if you have a swap partition, you can use /tmp in tmpfs with low memory. It still will be faster.