Re: [PLUG] swappiness and ssd

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

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:
>>
>> 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?  I'd think that
> accessing content over the net would be so much slower than disk that
> it wouldn't matter.

I actually have a tmpfs mounted on my chromium cache directory.  I
keep it pretty small.  Basically I don't want chromium to cache to
disk more than absolutely necessary, because 99% of the time it is
actually faster to load stuff off the network than off of disk, since
my disks tend to be pretty busy.

Doing this greatly improved my tab load times.  If my disk was in
heavy use chromium would sit there doing nothing for 30 seconds trying
to check the state of the disk cache, when loading the page probably
would take milliseconds.  It also cuts down on ssd wear besides.

--
Rich
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