Running out of temp space

There has been some confusion about the /tmp filesystem in Solaris.  The confusion stems from the fact that the filesystem is listed as 'swap'.  The fun starts when you run out of virtual memory.  The problem is a lot of people think swap and virtual memory are the same thing.

When you run out of virtual memory, then try to write into /tmp, you get an error message saying the filesystem is full.  Some error message are not very clear.  This error message is completely clear, but completely wrong.  The problem is less technical people will insist they know the real solution.  They think we should increase the size of the /tmp filesystem.  It took a lot of arguing to convince people that we didn't need to increase the size of /tmp.  The next thing they wanted to do was buy more ram, but that was a whole other argument for another day.