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Ask HN: Does anyone stil use RAM disks?

by mr-pink on 8/7/23, 6:49 AM with 5 comments

• by dusted on 8/7/23, 7:34 AM

  Yes, for specific things.

  On my gaming pc i have a small 256GiB SSD for Windows, and a 4 disk raid0 of spinners for my games library (I have a policy of keeping all of my library installed and updated, so when I want to play a game, no time will be spent installing it).

  A few games will ignore the 64 GiB RAM in the machine, and insist on swapping random bits from disk at all times for no good reason (Diablo 2 Resurrected). I then create a ramdisk for the game and play off of that instead.

  This is on Windows by the way, I use "ImDisk"

• by LinuxBender on 8/7/23, 1:54 PM

  Yes all the time. Anything that would otherwise beat up my storage is performed in ram and then committed back to disk. I also use that any time I need to repeatedly grep large data-sets. I also log non critical data to ram and then rotate it out to disk so that web visitors are not thrashing my storage regardless if spinning disk or SSD. My daily driver creates several tmpfs mounts with specific UID/GID's on startup for my home directory to keep some applications from persisting data.

• by atmanactive on 8/7/23, 11:10 AM

  I use a RAM disk to hold my work related source tree on windows. Some 30000 files. Then I can do global search (find in files) on all files in a matter of seconds. Doing this on a fast NVMe without a RAM disk would usually take few minutes.

• by stop50 on 8/7/23, 6:56 AM

  My .cache is a ramdisk and several directories on linux are literal ramdisks.

• by DamonHD on 8/7/23, 6:54 AM

  As in zram and/or tmpfs on Linux? More than half the mounts on the first of my RPis that I just looked at are tmpfs, eg for /run.