Temporary files: RAM or disk?

I haven't shared your negative expediences with swap— at least not at any time during the past 5 years or so. I run all my systems— servers, desktops, and laptops alike with /tmp on tmpfs, with large swaps. I frequently have tens of gigs of data in tmpfs on workhorse machines.

On my laptop, at least before I used a SSD, tmpfs made a visible increase in battery life because the drive was no longer being woken up by tmp activity.