Knowledgebase

Linux RAM Disk: Creating A Filesystem In RAM

Software RAM disks use the normal RAM in main memory as if it were a partition on a hard drive rather than actually accessing the data bus normally used for secondary storage such as hard disk. How do I create and store a web cache on a RAM disk to improve the speed of loading pages under Linux operating systems?

You can create the ram disk as follows (8192 = 8M, no need to format the ramdisk as a journaling file system) :
# mkfs -q /dev/ram1 8192 # mkdir -p /ramcache # mount /dev/ram1 /ramcache # df -H | grep ramcache
Sample outputs:
/dev/ram1              8.2M   1.1M   6.7M  15% /ramcache
Next you copy images or caching objects to /ramcache
# cp /var/www/html/images/*.jpg /ramcache
Now you can edit Apache or squid reverse proxy to use /ramcache to map to images.example.com:
 
<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@example.com
     ServerName images.example.com
     DocumentRoot /ramcache
     #ErrorLog /var/logs/httpd/images.example.com_error.log
     #CustomLog /var/logs/httpd/images.example.com_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
 
Reload httpd:
# service httpd reload

Now all hits to images.example.com will be served from the ram. This can improve the speed of loading pages or images. However, if server rebooted all data will be lost. So you may want to write /etc/init.d/ script to copy back files to /ramcache. Create a script called initramcache.sh:
#!/bin/sh
mkfs -t ext2 -q /dev/ram1 8192
[ ! -d /ramcache ] && mkdir -p /ramcache
mount /dev/ram1 /ramcache
/bin/cp /var/www/html/images/*.jpg /ramcache
Call it from /etc/rc.local or create softlink in /etc/rc3.d/
# chmod +x /path/to/initramcache.sh # echo '/path/to/initramcache.sh' >> /etc/rc.local