Re: [PLUG] swappiness and ssd

[Thomas Delrue <delrue.thomas@gmail.com>]

On 04/17/2015 04:41 PM, Soren Harward wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 10:00:01AM -0400, Soren Harward wrote:
>>> On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Eric H. Johnson
>>> <ejohnson@camalytics.com> wrote:
>>>> If you use Firefox a lot, you may want to move it's cache to ram as well. Your fstab line will look something like this:
>>>>
>>>> tmpfs /home/les/.mozilla/firefox/vkuuxfit.default/Cache tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0
>>>
>>> If you have /tmp mounted in RAM (which you should), then a cleaner way
>>> to do this is just to change Firefox's cache directory to /tmp using
>>> the browser.cache.disk.parent_directory configuration setting.
>>> Chromium can do the same using the --disk-cache-dir command-line
>>> option.
>>
>> If you do this, you're essentially dedicating a portion of your RAM
>> solely to your web browser cache.  If you don't, the kernel's disk
>> cache will still keep frequently accessed web content in RAM, plus you
>> won't have to download everything again if you reboot.  Is it really
>> that much faster to justify dedicating RAM to it?

Or, asking the question in a different fashion: "will my machine run
*that* much faster by being able to use that (small) portion of my RAM
which is /not/ dedicated to browsing?"
From an OpSec POV, I also consider having to 'download it again' a good
thing. My browser doesn't store anything between sessions (yes,
sessions, not reboots).

> No.  But we were talking about putting web cache in RAM as a strategy
> for minimizing writes to physical disk, not as a way of speeding up
> web browsing.

It also prevents writing data to disk that you don't want persisted or
recovered at a later time. (Think TAILS, Tor or whatever other OpSec
reason you may have) If it's been on your disk, it can be (fairly
easily) recovered.

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