Stefan de Konink wrote:
..very offtopic but how are you all compiling stuff like firefox on a ram disk. Or is 8GB of ram very cheap suddenly?
Swap is your friend. The performance hit is the same as what you'd get compiling on disk if pages need to be swapped out. The performance is of course far superior for any pages that don't need to be swapped out. The big clean at the end is of course MUCH faster in a ram-disk.
The beauty of tmpfs is that it performs no worse than disk in the worst case, and in the case of short-lived files it performs far better. If you write, use, and delete a file on disk (more than a few seconds apart) the kernel actually takes care to sync everything as if you cared about the file 10 minutes into the future. The kernel can also be far more opportunistic with how it swaps pages compared to how it flushes buffers - since there is a general understanding that when you write to a file you care about being able to read it back in a few days.
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