Stefan de Konink wrote:
> ..very offtopic but how are you all compiling stuff like firefox on a
> ram disk. Or is 8GB of ram very cheap suddenly?
> 

Swap is your friend.  The performance hit is the same as what you'd get 
compiling on disk if pages need to be swapped out.  The performance is 
of course far superior for any pages that don't need to be swapped out. 
  The big clean at the end is of course MUCH faster in a ram-disk.

The beauty of tmpfs is that it performs no worse than disk in the worst 
case, and in the case of short-lived files it performs far better.  If 
you write, use, and delete a file on disk (more than a few seconds 
apart) the kernel actually takes care to sync everything as if you cared 
about the file 10 minutes into the future.  The kernel can also be far 
more opportunistic with how it swaps pages compared to how it flushes 
buffers - since there is a general understanding that when you write to 
a file you care about being able to read it back in a few days.
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