Just the other day, I wrote about using ramdisks. I briefly touched on mounting at boot with the fstab file. One possible use for this is mounting a ramdisk for the /tmp directory, which increases the read/write speeds for often used temporary files.

After around a week of using this ramdisk, I’ve seen only small speed increases, and those are mainly in the play back of videos from the Internet. People running a slower hard drive, or a hard drive with a smaller cache may find that this tip has a more noticeable impact, but should keep in mind that it reduces the amount of RAM available to the system - thus is only worth implementing if you rarely use all of your RAM.

To mount a one gigabyte ramdisk, add the following line to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs uid=root,size=1G 0 0

For other options for using ramdisks, see my previously mentioned article.