Answers to: [Debian Base] Extra ram: What can I symlink to /dev/shm to improve system performance?

Answer by craigevil

craigevil — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:36:29 -0400

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/ How to Increase the Lifespan and Performance of Your Solid State Drive With Linux http://www.brighthub.com/computing/linux/articles/9170.aspx

There are a few things you can tweak including putting Firefox's cache in tmpfs.

Answer by kainosnous

kainosnous — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:25:33 -0400

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that you have excess RAM and are considering using some of that space to improve performance. I'm not terribly sure that the benefits that you gain would be worth the trouble. Basically, what you are trying to do is use that fact that your RAM is faster to read/write and therefore any directory/file that you write to frequently would gain some small performance gain.

However, the down side is that any changes made there will not be saved once it is unmounted. That means that you will have to copy any files that you want to use. Perhaps you could symlink /tmp there, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice.

You might consider instead creating a separate ramfs and configuring frequently used programs to store their temporary data there.

Answer by r0000t

r0000t — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:00:03 -0400

Is your netbook swapping to disk at all? Your looking to improve performance based on the fact that Mint uses 200-500MB resident memory, but if your machine is not swapping to disk, there is no reason to fine tune memory allocation.

You can cat /proc/swaps and see if any swapping is happening during peak usage. You could also fine tune your swappiness value based on whether or not your currently swapping.

Answer by Web31337

Web31337 — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:59:44 -0400

I do use ramdisk on high-loaded webserver to store some static data which server refers to tens times per second, in this way it is a speed improvement. What are you trying to speed-up? Basically you will need to determine which files your application uses more often and put them into ramdisk. /dev/shm actually is not meant to be used by user, better way is to allocate separate ramfs disk and use it for that purposes.