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uses for a ram drive?

 
Rancher
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I have 1.5 and 2Gb on two machines and Linux is far too efficient to require all of that. I have been considering set aside some to use as a ram drive, but it hasn't been quite what I expected.

Firstly, does anyone use a ram drive and have a generic use for one? Secondly, my understanding was that the tmpfs file system would automatically create a ram drive which would resize up to a maximum percentage of the total memory and then swap when required, but I found mine had a fixed value of around 64M
 
Sheriff
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I've used a ram drive several times on machines without a hard drive (or with a slow "hard drive equivalent" such as flash), but I guess that's not really the situation you are asking about.

Can you tell us a bit more about the applications you are running - maybe some of them would benefit from configuring to use a ram drive for working storage?
 
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Generic use. That is tough I think.

A contrived example where I think you would benefit:

You are in the business of running kernel builds (a lot of them).

Place make, gcc, cp, and some other utilities on a RAMDISK.

Make it first in your PATH.

I have never done something like this with Linux - but I have with some DOS systems (and yes, they had slow or no HDs to begin with).

Guy
 
Guy Allard
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As far as the size is concerned, take a look at this:

HowTo

I think it answers that question.

Guy
 
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