Problem: receiving error message:
WARNING: /tmp: File system full, swap space limit exceeded

/tmp becomes full when the following quasi equation looks like this for your
system:
((ram + swap - processes) * .9) - files_in_/tmp = 0
| | | | |
| ---------- | /tmp (avail)
| | |
| virtual memory |
| |
-------------------------------
|
/tmp (total)

Resolution Top

There are many things that can be done to remedy the problem, among them;
1. add more ram
2. add more swap
3. kill processes
4. delete files in /tmp

A fast and simple solution to add more swap is to create a swap file
and add it to the existing swap:

#mkfile <megs>m <path_to_filesystem_with_plenty_of_space>/swap
#swap -a <path_to_filesystem_with_plenty_of_space>/swap

Example:

#mkfile 20m /newdir/swapfile
#swap -a /newdir/swapfile

To make this swap space available (add the swap file to virtual memory) each
time the system is rebooted, add a line in the /etc/vfstab.

#device device mount FS fsck mount mount
#to mount to fsck point type pass at boot options
...
/swapfile - - swap - no -

This is inefficient though. Filesystems waste space for administrative reasons
(about 10%). They are slower than accessing raw disk too.
It is better to use a raw disk parition as a swap file.

There may be plenty of virtual memory. The problem could be that some processes
are simply using too much swap and need to be killed/restarted. Some badly
written/configured programs will take up all available memory no matter how
much of it is available.

The see which processes are using the most memory run the following command:

# /usr/bin/ps -el | sort -rn -k 10
8 S 52475 2594 345 0 40 20 60b1adc0 17325 6098872e ? 57:24 Xsun
8 S 52475 8111 8092 0 51 20 60d6efa0 3882 61915dfe pts/4 1:06 sotool
8 S 52475 9054 19313 0 51 20 60d07658 1568 pts/6 0:26 dtmail
8 S 0 3211 1 1 43 20 609f2038 1207 60989a16 ? 66:41 esd
8 S 0 3213 1 0 40 20 6095c6e0 1146 60989a66 ? 27:01 esd
8 S 52475 2739 2728 0 51 20 60cea208 1128 60b2a0c6 ? 0:01 nametool
^
The above ps output is sorted by process size. |
The biggest offenders are at the top. |
The 10th column is the process size in pages. _______|

To see how big a page is in kbytes, run the pagesize command:
# pagesize
8192