#45: Super-fast temporary files Remember the old days of RAM disks? Well, Linux has them too! If you've never tried them, a RAM disk is a virtual filesystem that runs entirely from your PC's main memory, which means it's lightning fast to read and write anything you want.
How much space you choose to allocate to your RAM disk is down to how much RAM you have and how much you plan to use it - if you have 1GB of RAM, you can easily spare 64MB for a ramdisk; if you have 2GB you can probably spare 256MB, and if you're lucky enough to have 4GB then you can easily stretch your RAM disk legs with 1GB. Here's how to set up a 64MB disk - just change the 65536 for the size you want: mkfs -t ext3 -q /dev/ram1 65536 mkdir -p /ramdisk mount /dev/ram1 /ramdisk -o defaults,rw Alternatively, a reader suggested you could also try using tmpfs, like this: mkdir /ramdisk mount none -t tmpfs -o size=256M /ramdisk That will allocate 256MB of space to your RAM disk. If you skip the "-o size=256M" part, half your RAM will be used by default. #46: Avoid the disk There's very little that's more annoying in Linux than its ability to use the swap file completely regardless of how much RAM you have installed on your machine. Yes, this is helpful in some scenarios - notably when your system is under heavy load and is really getting maxed out - but generally, if you have 2GB or more RAM, you'll have lots free waiting to be used. The way to force Linux to use swap space less is to edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file and to look for (or create) the vm.swappiness line. If you have lots of RAM and want to minimise the amount of swapping Linux does, set the line to be this: vm.swappiness=10 #47: No more disk thrashing We've said this time and time again, but people really never seem to take it seriously: if you want your disks to run at their full potential, make sure and enable the relatime option in /etc/fstab. You see, every time your disk does a read (eg reading a file), it also does a write, to store the information pertaining to when the file was last read. This process is incredibly slow, and you can get a sizeable speed boost - usually around 10 per cent - with just one simple tweak. Switch to root, then open up /etc/fstab in your favourite text editor. Look for where you root filesystem is, and make sure that it uses defaults,relatime,data=writeback for its settings, then save, reboot and let your poor overworked PC perform to its full potential... At last!
