tmpfs for samba share
 

Hello!

I would like to install a fast share.

As we allready use tmpfs for temporary files ( like ClamAV ) I tought about installing a share ( samba ) on a tmpfs.

So when the server starts the files would be copied for a directory on the normal disk to a tmpfs directory ( where there only be read never changed ).

Did anybody ever tought of such a installation, test it or have any hinds what could go wrong ?

Unless you have a lot of disk activity in the background, I don't know how much that is really going to increase your performance. Your network throughput is going to be the bottleneck here, not the read speed of the drive.

Unless you have gigabit Ethernet in place, but even then, there are inherent speed limitations in the SMB/CIFS protocol that will fall short of the drive's speed.

That said, there is no reason you couldn't do it. Write up a little script to copy the files into tmpfs at boot, and have clients mount it read-only.