[arch-general] What dirs are good to put in a tmpfs?

[Chris Moline]

Daniel Micay <danielmicay at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's no need to "guess andbenchmark" because the kernel is already managing this for you.

> A great way to utilize RAM is to run several VMs :) Also I wonder what is your
> chipset/RAM type, because on a typical desktop board with modern CPU and RAM
> modules, your memory size should be even for the optimal (dual-channel)
> performance. Or is your video memory shared?

 AMD A6-5400K APU
DIMM DDR3 Synchronous, 2x8Gs

I didn't see an option in my bios for shared memory so im assuming
it's not, or that I'm blind

> It all depends on your usage pattern.

I've installed a system monitor and I've found that the only time my
disk io is high is when i'm running deluged. Would my torrents dir be
a good candidate for tmpfs? It's rather larger than my torrents dir
but is it possible to have the most intensive torrents put into it? Or
is this unneccesary?

> One procedure which really benefits from being done in RAM is building
> packages, especially large ones like gcc, glibc or qemu.
>
> In some circumstances, you'd want to store systemd journal and/or part of
> syslog log files in RAM. For example, HostAP (wireless authentication) daemon
> can log a lot. As a result, the journal grows dozens of MiB a day which
> quickly makes reading it off the disk rather painful. Since the journal cannot
> be fine tuned, I usually configure it to be volatile, and also tell syslog to
> write hostapd-related messages to e.g. /tmp/log/hostapd.log.

I've put in ~/src/<specific-dirs> but logging doesn't apply to me.

> For a regular desktop, people put in RAM ~/.mozilla, ~/.local/chromium (or
> whatever Chrome uses these days), etc. However, in my experience the resulting
> speedup is next to none and not worth the risk of data loss in case of a power
> failure or a system freeze...

I've installed profile-sync-daemon. I haven't noticed any improvement
yet but I will keep using it for a month or so

> The truth is that on desktop machine which does
> not do virtualization, you don't need more than 2GiB or RAM. Remember, memory
> modules do consume power so it may be sensible to remove most of them.

Interesting, I've always thought the more ram the better :P

Thanks for your input guys.