Comments on: Overview of RAMFS and TMPFS on Linux

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:01:17 +0000

Deleting files on tmpfs does not seem to free the space instantly. It takes about 15 minutes for the freed space to appear on “df”. Anything we could do to free the space instantly?

By: vennila

vennila — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:51:33 +0000

I got good information about tmpfs and ramfs.
Thank you!

By: tom3k

tom3k — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:46:16 +0000

iv been seeing alot about a mount paramater “maxsize” for ramfs…

does anyone know if this paramater exists?

i would like basically the features of ramfs (non swap, growing…) but without the hazard of having it fill my ram to 100%.

im using it for my mysql temp folder…

By: Leslie Satenstein

Leslie Satenstein — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:49:39 +0000

Currently without a ramdisk, my /tmp is getting filled with deletable files (delete on next boot).

By creating the tmpfs as above, what will direct applications to it?

Otherwise, if it is automatic, how can I benefit from it in a system startup situation?

By: johnsfine

johnsfine — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:34:51 +0000

I think you had too much discussion of copying data to disk periodically or on shutdown. Tmpfs or ramfs are mostly used for data that you would never want after the next reboot. If it is worth the time/trouble of backing up to disk, it is worth the time to create it on disk in the first place. Trust the system level caching to make better decisions than you can make manually about buffering writes in ram for speed with delayed writes to disk soon enough for safety.

By: Ramesh

Ramesh — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:10:05 +0000

@k3ninho,

Thanks for pointing it out. I’ve corrected the comparison table.

@Frank

dev/shm is the typical shared memory. You can use it to pass application data between various process. Following link has an interesting discussion thread on this topic:

http://www.mail-archive.com/lfs-chat@linuxfromscratch.org/msg01251.html

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:29:35 +0000

How do these options differ from simply using /dev/shm?

By: k3ninho

k3ninho — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 15:13:17 +0000

Ramesh,

Can you also correct the table (Comparison of ramfs and tmpfs)? The reference to Non-Volatile Storage doesn’t make sense. In the standard sense of volatile or non-volatile storage, RAM used in both RAMFS and TMPFS is volatile because when it loses power, it also loses data.

K3n.

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Drupal performance tuning (1) : PHP Professionals — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:22:20 +0000

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By: Ramesh

Ramesh — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:56:44 +0000

@aa, @WB, @Prune,

Ramfs does not use swap. I’ve corrected it in the article. Like Prune mentioned, while copying the guest article and formatting it, I made a mistake. I apologize for the mistake and sincerely appreciate your help in pointing out the issue.