Moving /tmp to a tmpfs

There is a move afoot in Linux-land to make /tmp a tmpfs file-system. For those of you who don't know what that is, tmpfs is in essence a ramdisk. OpenSUSE is considering the ramifications of this possible move. There are some good points to this move:

• A lot of what goes on in /tmp are ephemeral files for any number of system and user processes, and by backing that with RAM instead of disk you make that go faster.
• Since a lot of what goes on in /tmp are ephemeral files, by backing it with RAM you save writes on that swanky new SSD you have.
• Since nothing in /tmp should be preserved across reboots, a ramdisk makes sense.

All of the above make a lot of sense for something like a desktop oriented distribution or use-case, much like the one I'm utilizing right this moment.

However, there are a couple of pretty large downsides to such a move:

• Many programs use /tmp as a staging area for potentially-larger-than-ram files.
• Some programs don't clean up after themselves, which leaves /tmp growing over time.

Working as I do in the eDiscovery industry where transforming files from one type to another is common event, the libraries we use to do that transformation can and do drop very big files in /tmp while they're working. All it takes is one bozo dropping a 20MB file with .txt at the end (containing a single SMTP email message with MIME'ed attachment) to generate an eight thousand page PDF file. Such a process behaves poorly when told "Out Of Space" for either RAM or '/tmp.

And when such processes crash out for some reason, they can leave behind 8GB files in /tmp.

That would not be happy on a 2GB RAM system with a tmpfs style /tmp.

In our case, we need to continue to keep /tmp on disk. Now we have to start doing this on purpose, not just trusting that it comes that way out of the tin.

Do I think this is a good idea? It has merit on high RAM workstations, but is a very poor choice for RAM constrained environments such as VPSs, and virtual machines.

Are the benefits good enough to merit coming that way out of the box? Perhaps, though I would really rather that the "server" option during installation default to disk-backed /tmp.