When should I use /dev/shm/ and when should I use /tmp?

Question

When should I use /dev/shm/ and when should I use /tmp? Can I always rely on them both being there on Unices?

Answer 1

/dev/shm is a temporary file storage filesystem, i.e. tmpfs, that uses RAM for the backing store. It can function as a shared memory implementation that facilitates IPC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared%5Fmemory:

Recent 2.6 Linux kernel builds have started to offer /dev/shm as shared memory in the form of a ramdisk, more specifically as a world-writable directory that is stored in memory with a defined limit in /etc/default/tmpfs. /dev/shm support is completely optional within the kernel config file. It is included by default in both Fedora and Ubuntu distributions, where it is most extensively used by the Pulseaudio application.

/tmp is the location for temporary files as defined in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which is followed by almost all Unix and Linux distributions.

Since RAM is significantly faster than disk storage, you can use /dev/shm instead of /tmp for the performance boost, if your process is I/O intensive and extensively uses temporary files.

To answer your questions: No, you cannot always rely on /dev/shm being present, certainly not on machines strapped for memory. You should use /tmp unless you have a very good reason for using /dev/shm.

Remember that /tmp can be part of the / filesystem instead of a separate mount, and hence can grow as required. The size of /dev/shm is limited by excess RAM on the system and hence you're more likely to run out of space on this filesystem.

Answer 2

Okay, here's the reality.

Both tmpfs and a normal filesystem are a memory cache over disk.

The tmpfs uses memory and swapspace as it's backing store a filesystem uses a specific area of disk, neither is limited in the size the filesystem can be, it is quite possible to have a 200GB tmpfs on a machine with less than a GB of ram if you have enough swapspace.

The difference is in when data is written to the disk. For a tmpfs the data is written ONLY when memory gets too full or the data unlikely to be used soon. OTOH most normal Linux filesystems are designed to always have a more or less consistent set of data on the disk so if the user pulls the plug they don't lose everything.

Personally, I'm used to having operating systems that don't crash and UPS systems (eg: laptop batteries) so I think the ext2/3 filesystems are too paranoid with their 5-10 second checkpoint interval. The ext4 filesystem is better with a 10 minute checkpoint, except it treats user data as second class and doesn't protect it. (ext3 is the same but you don't notice it because of the 5 second checkpoint)

This frequent checkpointing means that unnecessary data is being continually written to disk, even for /tmp.

So the result is you need to create swap space as big as you need your /tmp to be (even if you have to create a swapfile) and use that space to mount a tmpfs of the required size onto /tmp.

NEVER use /dev/shm.

Unless, you're using it for very small (probably mmap'd) IPC files and you are sure that it exists (it's not a standard) and the machine has more than enough memory + swap available.

Answer 3

Use /tmp/ for temporary files. Use /dev/shm/ when you want shared memory (ie, interprocess communication through files).

You can rely on /tmp/ being there, but /dev/shm/ is a relatively recent Linux only thing.