How to decompress 20GB of files; tmpfs keeps filling up

Question

I need to decompress huge files when I upload them into a software and it is failing. I thought the problem was with tmpfs. Then I decided to use /tmp as tmpfs, but still failing. I can upload files that after decompression are smaller than 4.8GB, which is the tmpfs at /run. So how could I change it? Here is the df -h output:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2       817G  3.9G  771G   1% /
udev             12G  4.0K   12G   1% /dev
tmpfs           100G   16K  100G   1% /tmp
tmpfs           4.8G  992K  4.8G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none             12G  148K   12G   1% /run/shm
/dev/sdb2       2.6T   99G  2.4T   4% /home
/dev/sdc1       1.9T  1.6T  301G  84% /media/My Book

Thank you.

Answer 1

All tmpfs file systems are backed by the kernel page cache. This means that their maximum capacity is roughly the amount of free memory and swap space on the system. The only way you're going to get more space on a tmpfs is:

1. close memory hungry applications.
2. add more RAM to the system.
3. add more swap space to the system.

But if you're talking about temporary files with sizes in gigabytes, you are probably better off using a location backed by real disk rather than a tmpfs.