Tmpfs/ The need for speed

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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i have been playing around with my personal laptop all day, and some things are a bit sluggish, I can’t replace the HDD yet (5400rpm) but I do have about 4GB of ram I do not use under typical work loads. Has anyone here had any experience with running applications (Browser etc.) from a tmpfs/ ?

Does anyone run any other i/o intensive workloads, or do this for fun just to squeak out a bit of performance from their machines? If so, post you scenarios below. If you run the browser from here explain how and what directories you move to it.

Thanks !

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What I’d look into is something like ZFS or BCachefs for that. Use the extra ram to cache frequently accessed data.

On our production machines, we either use 1TB of ram and a massive ZFS ARC or an array of FusionIO cards.

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if this is linux, just dump this in at the bottom of your fstab file:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

then Reboot,

i don’t do an install without it.

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What I ended up trying is mounting /tmpfs at my ~/.mozilla folder and copying the mozilla folder over to it at boot. A copy of the folder is rsynced after multi-user.target using systemd.service, a back up of the current mozilla folder is rsynced every 5 minutes to preserve a working copy using systemd.timer just in case.

I will possibly post a tutorial for anyone willing to try.

The performance is insane in comparison. My start up times were roughly a minute (1min cold boot, 40sec otherwise) for firefox with 4 tabs loading at launch, which is now down to 4 seconds.

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I wanted speed… I got it !

the /tmpfs is 1GB and I typically have 10 tabs open and don’t fill it up. If I had more disposable RAM, I would kick to 2GB, but right now, things are so smooth on this 5 yr old laptop.

This is what I have in /etc/fstab. I added size=1G and the mount point which is the .mozilla folder.

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Should be a Zram module built into the mainline kernel that can be enabled or even installed for all Ubuntu derived operating systems and related kernels and/or [a] package[s] that can be installed that noticably improve your over all speed.
Additionally, there are some command line tweaks you can make directly to the kernel to improve further upon that in the kernel’s scheduling and I/O settings.

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Their is the tuned-adm package that tweaks settings for the performance you need depending on what you need. I think the package is .rpm only, but you could still use the sysctl tweaks.

Also, why not use puppy linux, or use the boottoram option

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I’m on Fedora and have it on all my other machines, Gnome is a hog so I have to switch to i3 on my Laptop soon. The browser was taking way too long to start. I did go up to 8GB so I can spare about 4GB now. The browser and other i/o intese things I am working on.

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If I’m not mistaken, Fedora should also have the package I spoke of above previously as well as the kernel tweaks being applicable through the command line interface.

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