74 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
74 lines
4.3 KiB
Plaintext
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Episode: 277
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Title: HPR0277: tmpfs
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0277/hpr0277.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:25:00
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---
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Here we go.
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Welcome to another edition of Hacker Public Radio.
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Today will be your host, Thutex, and today we'll be talking about TempeFS.
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Why would you want to use a TempeFS?
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Well the situation is similar to when you go to a gas station and you see those super
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duper-sized colas that it just cost 10-20 cents more and you figure, hey, I'll buy the
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big one.
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But then when you try to drink in it, you don't want to do with all that sort of...
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You might have a similar case with the RAM in your computer.
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RAM is so cheap now that you can get gobs and gobs of it just for a little bit more
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money.
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But then you run into the problem of what do you do with it, how do you make use of it?
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If you're running Linux, you might have a hard time getting over usage of one gigabyte
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and you have all that extra RAM that you're not using.
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So we can use this RAM as it was not originally intended and put a file system on there
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and save files to the RAM disk.
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One of the options that you have is a TempeFS file system.
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This is available with most Unix distributions.
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It's mounted by default in slash temp in the Suncelerus version.
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There is not an elegant TempeFS file system in Microsoft Windows according to Wikipedia,
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but they do have ways to save some files to memory.
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So how would you do this in Linux?
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Well, you could use the Mount command or your F-stab and you do Mount Space-T for the
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type and the type is going to be TempeFS, TMP, FS, and you have a couple options that you
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can specify with a space dash, dash, or switch.
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One is size equals and that will specify the maximum size that this file system will have.
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If you specify a size here, it's going to use only what it needs as it needs it.
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So if you specify one gigabyte as your size, it's not going to take up one gigabyte right
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away.
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It's going to only take up one gigabyte when you start building up that gigabyte.
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So that's just a maximum and unlike RAMFS, it can make use of your virtual memory too.
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So size is one option you might want to specify.
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Another option you might want to specify is the NR underscore I nodes and that is remember
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I nodes are something like just a file on your system.
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So if you plan on putting many, many files inside this file system, then you would want
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to increase that number.
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It's usually set to a default of a small number so you might want to increase that.
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And then the device, you can just put something like none or TMPFS and then the mount point.
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Why would you do this?
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Why would you want to TMPFS?
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Well, a lot of times, biggest bottleneck in the system will be writing IO to your hard disk.
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IO to the hard disk is very slow and writing to system RAM is much, much faster.
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So if you have something where you're writing to the disk a lot and you want to increase your speed,
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you can write your files to the TMPFS.
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This might be compiling some software or working with really large files like a video editing
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or something like this.
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And you can greatly improve your performance this way.
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There's also other reason to do this.
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A good example is for laptops.
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If you have a solid state drive in your laptop and you want to prevent unnecessary writing to that drive,
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to increase its lifetime, you can put all your temporary files in the TMPFS.
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A typical spot to mount TMPFS is a lifetime or slash versus slash log.
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And so your log files won't be written to slash temp.
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So that can increase the lifetime of your SSD.
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If you have a the usual disk hard drive, this is also a good idea.
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Because spinning up the hard drive and spinning down the hard drive takes better battery life.
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So to prevent that when with sparse usage, for example, you're browsing the web and you're just not running some images once in a while.
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And those need to get written to the cache, say Firefox's cache.
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And you can change where the Firefox writes its cache and the about colon config and put that on a TMPFS.
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So your hard drive won't have to spin up when you download your do-comic that you're going to look at.
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Also, slash versus slash log would help in that case.
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And so that concludes TMPFS.
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Have fun, happy hacking. Have a good day.
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Thank you for listening to Hack Republic Radio.
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Now we're sponsored by caro.net. So head on over to CARO.nc for all of us here.
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Thanks for watching.
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