/tmp 100% full; sometimes reflected in syslog with: Can't write to temporary file: No space left on device

Hi,

This morning I got this message in syslog (since lost):

anacron[14203]: Can't write to temporary file: No space left on device

I ran df . -h and got:

Is there something I can do to expand the size of /tmp?

My understanding (shaky) is that /tmp is actually mapped to RAM on Debian. I currently have 4 GB RAM. I understand I could put in a cron job to periodically clear /tmp, but that's probably not safe for running processes. I verified /tmp is cleared on reboot.

Thanks!

Mark M.

Thank you! I will get some more RAM. After I do that, will it still be necessary to increase the size of tmpfs or will it detect the new RAM automatically? My guess is the latter since there is no size specified in fstab now.

One more followup, please: since I'm filling up 4 GB rapidly, I expect that I'll fill up (say) 8 GB almost as quickly. Does it make sense to (somehow) point /tmp to a fast NVMe drive with plenty of capacity to avoid further problems? If it does, a hint how would be appreciated.

Thanks again!

Thank you! I had the same idea and found that ALL of the 1.8GB in /tmp was used by Plex! That was a shock.

And it so happens that there's an active discussion right now between customer support and engineers in the Plex forum about what broke /tmp usage and how to fix it. A big part of the discussion is how users are supposed to designate where Plex puts his temporary files, since some of the long prescribed ways in fact don't work!

But I found one way that did work, so I'm using it for now. Just putting the information here in case someone finds it useful:

Add following to override.conf in /etc/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service.d:

[Service]

Environment="TMPDIR=/srv/dev-disk-by-label-data1/plex_media_server_tmpdir"

Oh, and just to be ultra ultra clear, the dir after TMPDIR= is wherever you want your Plex temp dir to be. This is just an example.

I think I'll go ahead and double my RAM to 8 GB anyway. Just for jollies and it's cheap.

Right, I know nothing about dockers so this is only applicable to a plug-in or direct Debian Plex install.

OTOH I'm just using something I picked up from the back and forth in the Plex forum. I imagine once they have a fix it'll be migrated to the official Plex docker.