Increasing the Size of tmpDSK (/tmp)

You may have noticed that cPanel’s default partition size for /tmp is 512 MB, which in some cases can be way too small.  The /tmp partition on cPanel servers, assuming it was the one cPanel created and not one you did yourself, is a file-based partition that can easily be resized.

By default on most servers, /tmp is the temporary dumping place for a lot of things, for example:

• PHP session files


• PHP temporary file uploads


• MySQL temporary files


• Cache files for certain Apache modules

Most software that uses temporary files or sessions will automatically prefer to use /tmp – this folder is usually set to 777  permissions and therefore writeable by every user on the server.

When your /tmp partition fills up, it can cause noticeable problems for your users. If you run a larger server, the /tmp folder can fill up quickly and be very annoying as far as maintenance is concerned. Fortunately there is a very easy way to increase the size of this partition on a standalone server.

1. Stop MySQL, Apache, and cPanel to prevent writing to the /tmp partition


2. Copy the contents of /tmp to another location, such as /home (cp -rfp /tmp /home)


3. Unmount /tmp. If you’re unable to, you can do an lsof (lsof |grep /tmp) to see what processes are still writing to it, and kill them off. Or do a lazy unmount (umount -l /tmp) .


4. Delete /usr/tmpDSK (rm -rf /usr/tmpDSK)

Now open /scripts/securetmp and look for this line:

my $tmpdsksize     = 512000;    # Must be larger than 250000

And change the “512000? value to your desired size in MB, and save the file. Now run the following script to recreate /tmp:

/scripts/securetmp

This will recreate your /tmp (tmpDSK) partition using the size you specified. While the securetmp script may be overwritten in a cPanel update, the size of /tmp will not be affected one you alter its size.