Use a RAM Disk to Improve Disk Access Times

This is post #15 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.” One of the biggest things folks in IT worry about is data loss. We go to enormous lengths to protect our data, using backups, snapshots, remote replication, rsync, scp, temporary copies in our own home directories… you name it. The thing is, as we look at our systems we sometimes discover that our applications do a lot of writing of temporary files. These temporary files often don’t need any particular protection because they’re transient, yet we write them to our expensive, already overtaxed disk arrays, commit the writes over long distances to our DR sites, …

Read More