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**dibl** · Aug 09, 2015, 08:38 AM

Here is a nice dissertation on the topic.

I was curious and checked my Debian system. Here the analogous open-but-deleted files are in /dev/shm, which is a tmpfs in RAM (so it does not affect disk utilization until you start swapping). I'm not sure whether the *buntus followed Debian in adoption of /dev/shm and its subdirectories as a tmpfs a couple years ago, but you might want to take a look at a 15.04 live CD. If 15.04 uses /dev/shm, then you might indeed want to reinstall it.

More here.

**elijathegold** · Aug 09, 2015, 09:08 AM

Yeah, I knew that. What's different this time is the amount of them and how damn quickly they eat my hard disk. After a bit more poking around:

I have a tmpfs mounted on /dev/shm and it is being used by pulse audio
/tmp is mounted nowhere but the folder exists. It seems this is being used by everything else which feels a little weird!

Code:

mount | grep tmp
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=8157428k,nr_inodes=2039357,mode=755)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=1634748k,mode=755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
tmpfs on /run/user/121 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1634748k,mode=700,uid=121,gid=133)
tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=1634748k,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000)

My secondary laptop which is currently running a clean install of Ubuntu 15.04 in another attempt to like Unity shows the same behaviour and mounts or lack of, but, there are only a few deleted files and they grow at nowhere near the same rate.

I really don't want to spend time re-installing if it isn't definitely going to improve things.

**dibl** · Aug 09, 2015, 09:12 AM

A quick and dirty option would be to add the following line to your /etc/fstab file, and mount /tmp as a tmpfs:

none /tmp tmpfs defaults,relatime,mode=1777 0 0

Try it out and see if you get an improvement without other adverse consequences.

I do this for an OS installed on a SSD, to reduce write cycles on the SSD.

**elijathegold** · Aug 09, 2015, 09:29 AM

I normally do that on all my Linux installs but limit it to a couple of Gig (I have 16GB RAM so I figure why not), but I guess I forgot when I did the original 14.04 install. The penalty of age and tranquillisers.

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Hard disk space being eaten by deleted files

Hard disk space being eaten by deleted files

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