Ram disk Scratch Space

[Wols Lists]

On 29/09/19 11:26, Jonathan Aquilina wrote:
> Hi Wol,
> 
> I have 16gb of ram. When I was on gentoo I was using 9gb of ram as a ramdisk to help speed up compilation. You mention temp if its on the same disk aren’t you going to have no gains in performance like that?
> 
My reasoning was "it can't harm and might help". If /tmp is tmpfs then
it gets cleared out every boot. Saves wasting space. And
/var/tmp/portage was tmpfs for the same reason - if the system crashed
during an upgrade it would have caused a bit of a problem but otherwise
it's fine.

Where is your swap? Is that on the same disk - do you only have the one?
A tmpfs stores everything in memory - ram+virtual - so if it runs out of
ram it overflows into swap. I just wanted the space available if it was
needed.

Bear in mind also that if you make heavy use of tmpfs, then with gentoo
it probably never touches the hard drive - it's downloaded, exploded and
compiled in ram all the way. On Fedora, it'll be slower because it needs
to be pulled from disk by the compiler. And a ramdisk won't help because
you've got to copy it on to the disk ... :-)

I'd just trust linux to do the best with what's available, and don't
expect two very different distros to behave similarly.

Cheers,
Wol