Temporary files: RAM or disk?

Posted Jun 4, 2012 15:17 UTC (Mon) by Serge (guest, #84957)
In reply to: Temporary files: RAM or disk? by neilbrown
Parent article: Temporary files: RAM or disk?

> If you create then delete a file, the data will not go to disk, except possibly for "data=journal". But the metadata will.

That's harder to test. Maybe compare amount of writes generated by something like:
for i in `seq 10`; do touch $i; rm -f $i; done
with amount of writes generated by:
for i in `seq 1000`; do touch $i; rm -f $i; done
Every creation/deletion is written to disk if the latter line generates about 100 times more writes. On my ext3 I see sub-equal number of writes...

But, anyway, looks like it's not a problem for /tmp then, meaning that ext2 would not be (noticeably) better than ext3 in /tmp use cases.