Tmpfs Tools Profile Sync Daemon (PSD)
Profile-sync-daemon (psd) is a tiny pseudo-daemon designed to manage your browser's profile in tmpfs and to periodically sync it back to your physical disc (HDD/SSD). This is accomplished via a symlinking step and an innovative use of rsync to maintain back-up and synchronization between the two. One of the major design goals of psd is a completely transparent user experience.
It is designed to work on desktop systems, but by creating custom fake profiles it could be used for non production servers :) Currently I'm using it to minimize Brave browser disk writings. More information about the PSD's Brave profile could be foun in the references section below.
Preparation
Identify which directories has high I/O rate by the following command.
sudo watch -d -n 1 "find ~/.cache ~/.config -type f -size +80k -mmin -10 -printf '%-30s \t %t %p\n'"
Check the current size of the identified directories.
du -hs ~/.cache ~/.config
Take a statistic for the average disk write per minute before the setup.
iostat -h /dev/nvme0n1 -d 60 -t
Install log2ram
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/azlux-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.azlux.fr/debian/ bullseye main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azlux.list
sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/azlux-archive-keyring.gpg https://azlux.fr/repo.gpg
sudo apt update
sudo apt install log2ram
Setup log2ram
sudo nano /etc/log2ram.conf
SIZE=2G
MAIL=true
PATH_DISK="/var/log"
ZL2R=false
COMP_ALG=lz4
LOG_DISK_SIZE=100M
Modify the default systemd timer unit, if you want to log more or less frequently than one time per day.
sudo systemctl edit log2ram-daily.timer
Reboot the system. After the reboot check does it working and use the iostat command to take a new statistic.
References
- GitHub: log2ram
- ArchLinux Wiki: Firefox/Profile on RAM
- Linuxhowto.net: Write Log Files In RAM Using Log2ram In Linux
