Problem with /tmp - "No space" Error

[jim.thornton]

Hello:

When I login to root (via su -), I'm getting the following error:

Null message body; hope that's ok
/tmp/Rsoph96A: No space left on device

I am also getting other errors relating to the /tmp directory:
1. Uploading files via html/php fail because of this problem.
2. MySQL errors (I think 2 indicating a problem with the disk being full.

The think is that the partitions are not full. Here is the output from # df -h:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs             40G   11G   30G  26% /
tmpfs                 3.9G  4.0M  3.9G   1% /tmp

As you can see, there is A LOT of available room.

I thought I had this fixed last week. I deleted everything in the /tmp directory and created two directories:

/tmp/sessions (chmod 777)
/tmp/uploads (chmod 777)

Then I edited the php.ini file and made sure to set these directories for save.session_path and upload_tmp_dir

It seemed to work but after a few days I'm in the same mess.

A little while ago my host for my VPS decided to run updates on all the VPS' and lock down the /tmp directories. However, in this process they messed up a LOT of programs that I had running. I spend 2 or three days completely offline, then I was finally able to get PHP re-compiled again, but was unable to get eAccelerator working correctly (I think it isn't compatible with PHP 5.2.9).

Anyway... I have no clue what they did to the /tmp directory, and I have no clue how to debug or fix this problem.

Can anyone help me with this please?

[veerakumar]

The tmpfs uses RAM as disk space and your /tmp directory is located right in it. After some RAM would become full and you would have no space left in the /tmp directory.

[Rubberman]

When you use a ramdisk for /tmp it will "logically" allocate a lot of space (as you see), but how much it really gets depends upon how much RAM your system has and how much your are using for the OS and user processes. Personally, I always put /tmp on a hard drive with enough space for any forseeable uses (usually on / or /usr). Just to satisfy my curiosity, how much RAM does your system have, excluding swap?