The issue at hand:
My /var/tmp folder is stacking up on literary hundreds of folders called "container_images_storage_xxxxxxxxxx", where the x's present a random number. Each folder contains the following files called 1, 2 and 3 as seen in thumbnail. Each folder seems to increase in size too, as the lowest I can see is the size of 142.2 MiB, but the highest 2.1GB. This is a problem as it is taking up all my disk space, and even if I do delete them, they come back the next day... I believe this has something to do with podman, but I'm really not quite sure. All I use the PC for is browsing and gaming.
Is there a way to figure out where a file or folder is coming from on Linux? I've tried stat and file, but neither gave me any worthwhile information AFAIK. Would really appreciate some help to figure what causes this, I am still new to the Linux desktop and have no idea what is causing this issue. I am on atomic desktop, using Bazzite:latest.
stat:
stat 1
File: 1
Size: 1944283388 Blocks: 3797432 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: 0,74 Inode: 10938462619658088921 Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------) Uid: ( 1000/ buzz) Gid: ( 1000/ buzz)
Context: system_u:object_r:fusefs_t:s0
Access: 2024-05-06 12:18:37.444074823 +0200
Modify: 2024-05-06 12:22:51.026500682 +0200
Change: 2024-05-06 12:22:51.026500682 +0200
Birth: -
file
file 1
1: gzip compressed data, original size modulo 2^32 2426514442 gzip compressed data, reserved method, ASCII, extra field, encrypted, from FAT filesystem (MS-DOS, OS/2, NT), original size modulo 2^32 2426514442
If you have enough ram you could make /var/tmp a ramdisk, every reboot will clear it then.
Is this the kind of thing one can do on atmoic based desktops, if yes, then how? I have 32GB of ram :)
Don't do this... It's a stupid idea.
https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/create-ramdisk-linux
Silly question why do this over zram these days?
Doesn't zram compress what's in memory so systems with less ram can work a little better? If you've got enough for a ramdisk you don't need zram.
From what I understand, zram only works on a small portion of the ram, and it used as essentially a buffer between ram and swap, as swap is very slow. It actually benefits systems with more ram, if anything. The transparent compression takes far less time than swapping data to disk
Don't, atomic systems aren't made for these kinds of changes.
Thats what I figured when I started looking into the article. While tempting, it also doesnt fix my main issue.