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How to increase /tmp for a resource-intensive program?

PostPosted: Aug 17th, '14, 02:06
by Mateo1041
I'm running Hugin and it uses /tmp for file processing. I've been getting the following error:

enblend: No space left on device

enblend: an exception occured
enblend: enblend: error writing to image swap file.
Most likely cause: No space for temporary files.
Make sure that there is enough space in the temporary directory


That'd make sense if /tmp is too small as farther up in the log it generates temp files to that location. Here's the config:

System information
===========================================================================
Operating system: GNU/Linux
Release: 3.10.50-desktop-1.mga3
Kernel version: #1 SMP Sun Jul 27 19:10:08 UTC 2014
Machine: x86_64
Disc usage
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 12G 9.3G 1.8G 84% /
devtmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev
tmpfs 2.0G 1.6M 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 2.0G 528K 2.0G 1% /run
/dev/sda1 12G 9.3G 1.8G 84% /
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 2.0G 284K 2.0G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda6 443G 343G 100G 78% /home
Memory usage
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3951 3652 298 0 5 2134
-/+ buffers/cache: 1512 2438
Swap: 3991 554 3437


So basically my question is, is there a best way in Mageia to increase /tmp folder size? I was thinking 4GB or 6GB since it error out about halfway through currently. I have 4GB of RAM right now I think.

I saw some things when searching Google that I should add the following line to /etc/fstab:

none /tmp tmpfs size=2G 0 0 # Change the size= parameter to whatever you want


There's also the disk partition panel where I can change swap size if that has anything to do with it. But I'm leary when it warns me to back up my data first.

Just wondering if there's a best way to proceed. Thanks for any help you can offer!

- Matt

Re: How to increase /tmp for a resource-intensive program?

PostPosted: Aug 17th, '14, 06:30
by Mateo1041
Not sure if there's still an answer here that could help others in similar situations, but I did find that Hugin has a preference setting where one can specify a custom temporary file directory instead, so I ended up just doing that instead. Problem solved for me with this software at least.

Re: How to increase /tmp for a resource-intensive program?

PostPosted: Aug 17th, '14, 11:19
by doktor5000
Mateo1041 wrote:
tmpfs 2.0G 284K 2.0G 1% /tmp


I saw some things when searching Google that I should add the following line to /etc/fstab:

none /tmp tmpfs size=2G 0 0 # Change the size= parameter to whatever you want


/tmp is by default a tmpfs, that means it is located in RAM, and it will use half your RAM size by default as size. So if you want to increase it, you can change that setting, although you should be aware about the consequence - if more space in /tmp is used, you will have less RAM for applications.

Mateo1041 wrote:There's also the disk partition panel where I can change swap size if that has anything to do with it. But I'm leary when it warns me to back up my data first.

swap is what's used when your RAM is full, and unused memory pages will be swapped out there, which makes the system slower. You can increase that. The hint about backup always shows up when you open the partitioner, as kind of a safety measure. But increasing swap won't help you in your case.

What you did was probably the best workaround.

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [DONE], thanks