Creating a memory-backed storage on Linux

Frequently you’ll find that tmpfs is the most convenient one. Alternatively there’s also ramfs and ramdisk.

Starting with ramfs, it’s a memory FS that when mounted, it can use up to all available RAM space, so you might beware of using it. It is not configurable. tmpfs extends from it, adding configuration such as size limit. It by default allows swapping to disk when the system is under memory pressure, however, it can be configured to not to. Both use the system read cache, and grow or shrinks to accomodate the data in it. Setting them up is simple as mounting a filesystem, and no prepare steps are necessary.

Ramdisk on the other hand, is a block device and you need to put a filesystem on top of it. It allocates all the needed space upfront and is not dynamically resizable (i.e. you will need to recreate it and existing data will be lost). Because you need a filesystem, you will end up using one that include Journaling (afterall, they have disks in mind), which may decrease the performacne compared to its tmpfs and ramfs counterpart, but it’s the closest to emulating a real filesystem as it can get. For instance, while you can’t use O_DIRECT in tmpfs, you will be able to use it on a ramdisk.

Comparison table

See official docs for more information.

Why use it at all?

Does caring too much about having persistent storage on memory matter? In most cases, not really. See this answer for more information, but summarizing:

Running on tmpfs will be faster only if you have a lot of disk I/O that isn’t fulfilled from page cache.

If the I/O is reads and the files are already in cache, tmpfs will make no difference.

If the I/O is async writes without flushing and the workload is bursty rather than continuous and there is enough cache to soak up a burst of writes and the writes can be flushed in the background between the bursts, tmpfs will make no difference.

If there is no disk I/O to be done, tmpfs will make no difference.

If you have a lot of disk I/O and your process is blocked iowaiting for storage to catch up, running on tmpfs will make a huge difference. The slower your disks, the more difference it will make, right up to the point where you become CPU bottlenecked.

All in all, most of the time you just make sure that you have enough memory and you will be fine, no need for manual tuning such as this.

Using ramdisk

modprobe brd rd_nr=1 rd_size=4585760 max_part=1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 bs=300M count=1
sudo mkfs -t xfs -d size=300m,name=/dev/ram0

# Mounting it
mount -t xfs /dev/ram0 /mnt/path

# Removing /dev/ram0
umount /mnt/path
rmmod brd

Using ramfs

Mind you that ramfs doesn’t have any configurations to set:

mount -t ramfs none /mnt/path

Using tmpfs

You can also use noswap as an option if you desire.

mount -t tmpfs -o size=1g[,noswap] none /mnt/path

Resizing an existing mount

mount -o resize,size=2g /mnt/path