Temporary files: RAM or disk?

Posted Jun 8, 2012 0:59 UTC (Fri) by CycoJ (guest, #70454)
In reply to: Temporary files: RAM or disk? by wookey
Parent article: Temporary files: RAM or disk?

I encourage anyone who wants to see the benefit of having a tmpfs in RAM to try relocating the firefox profile to a tmpfs (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_Ramdisk). I've recently done this on my new system which normally has plenty of RAM to spare. The difference is quite impressive, even though I have a latest generation SSD. Mind you I've been bitten by this once. I kept too many tabs open while doing some simulation work on the side. When I tried to open one more tab, the whole system went into a complete freeze because it ran out of RAM (and I don't have a swap partition), obviously this happened when I was just booking a flight online, with only one last ticket available at this price.

Temporary files: RAM or disk?

Posted Jun 8, 2012 17:14 UTC (Fri) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]

For about a year now, I have had my "/.mozilla mounted as a tmpfs. I don't have a SSD, but I have 2Gb of RAM, and Firefox has never run out of memory for me.

It's screaming fast. I originally started doing this when I had my $HOME mounted over SSHFS, and Firefox would single-handedly saturate my pipe, and took forever to do anything. Its disk IO is (was) obscene.

This also has the benefit (if you want to see it that way) that my history does not get so filled with garbage, since every reboot the profile is reset. I have a line in my .Xclients which copies a template .mozilla into place, so that I start off with Noscript, Adblock, Tor, etc, all enabled, and my history is seeded with LWN and other sites I frequent.

Temporary files: RAM or disk?

Posted Jun 9, 2012 15:51 UTC (Sat) by Serge (guest, #84957) [Link]

> I encourage anyone who wants to see the benefit of having a tmpfs in RAM to try relocating the firefox profile to a tmpfs (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_Ramdisk). The difference is quite impressive, even though I have a latest generation SSD.

It might be a good idea to save some SSD writes, but does it really increases performance? My ~/.mozilla profile is about 2GB, so it was not a good idea to put it in RAM, but I tried that with a new empty profile and noticed no difference. What should I look at?

PS: it's not related to the /tmp dir, I assume, but it's still interesting to see some tmpfs benefits for a popular application.