files created then deleted at every second in tmp directory
I suggest installing and running fnotifystat to detect the process that is creating these files:
sudo apt-get install fnotifystat
sudo fnotifystat -i /tmp
You will see process that is doing the open/close/read/write activity something like the following:
Total Open Close Read Write PID Process Pathname
3.0 1.0 1.0 0.0 1.0 5748 firefox /tmp/cubeb-shm-5748-input (deleted)
2.0 0.0 1.0 0.0 1.0 18135 firefox /tmp/cubeb-shm-5748-output (deleted)
1.0 1.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 5748 firefox /tmp/cubeb-shm-5748-output (deleted)
Determine which program/process is touching files
You can use tools such as lsof
to determine which processes and binaries are touching/opening which files. This could become troublesome if the files change frequently, so you can instead set up a watch to notify you:
$ sudo fnotifystat -i /tmp
Sometimes, simply looking at the user or group owner gives you a good hint (ie: ls -lsha
).
Put /tmp
into RAM instead of disk
If you desire, you can put your /tmp
directory into RAM. You will have to determine if this is a smart move based on available RAM, as well as the size and frequency of read/writes.
$ sudo vim /etc/fstab
...
# tmpfs in RAM
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
...
$ sudo mount /tmp
$ mount | grep tmp # Check /tmp is in RAM
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,noatime)
If you have enough RAM, this can be considered a very good thing to do for both the longevity of your SSD, as well as the speed of your system. You can even accomplish this with smaller amounts of RAM if you tweak tmpreaper
(sometimes tmpwatch
) to be more aggressive.
very undesirable one on a SSD
You tagged your question with tmpfs, so it is not quite clear to me how this relates to SSD at all. Tmpfs is an in-memory (or more precisely, in-block-cache) filesystem, so it will never hit a physical disk.
Furthermore, even if you had a physical backing store for your /tmp
filesystem, unless you have a system with only a couple of kilobytes of RAM, those short-lived files will never hit the disk, all operations will happen in the cache.
So, in other words, there is nothing to worry about since you are using tmpfs, and if you weren't, there still would be nothing to worry about.