Want to add a “RAM disk” to your Red Hat Enterprise Linux host? If you mean an all-RAM filesystem then it’s super easy. Add this one line to your /etc/fstab:
none /ramdisk tmpfs defaults,size=1024m 1 2
(tabs between the fields, like everything else in fstab)
Then a “mount -a” will get it running. Obviously change size=1024m to be whatever makes sense.
Probably works great on other distributions, too, just haven’t tried it.
Hi Bob,
Thank you very much for this tip! It works on SLES 9, I am currently optimizing a 70GB table in a Postgres database and I was able to double the speed of the process by putting journal files on a ram disk. Now it will only take about 15 hours instead of 30.
Denis
It should be noted that you’re not setting up an actual RAMdisk – you’re using tmpfs, which also makes use of SWAP.