In the idea of sharing resources :

if you want to make a hudge ramdisk for mysql or what ever add this in /etc/fstab
none /ramdisk tmpfs size=16M 0 0

create the dir /ramdisk or whatever you want
and mount it.
now you have a ramdisk of 16M
Tested on RH, FC, and suse 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and large files 512M+
The ramdisk will use memory when it is filled.
NOTE !!!!

M can be replaced by G for giga...

DONT ! make it lager than you have ram is fact save at least 256 MB ut 512 M is better
NEVER make it larger then ramdisk and swap combined then the server will crash.
when it uses swap the system slows ofcourse

after a reboot the ramdisk is empty so also handy with lock files you dont want to have after a reboot.
i always make a /lock file dir of 16M but this is personal...

It is fun to make a hudge one (like 1 TERA) and mount it with samba ;-)
all those windows geeks freak out ...

Hope you don't do that kind of monkey business on a
production server :}

/me thinks "Power-failure ... RAM failure... data loss... "


Cheers,
Tink

no monkeys on production ;-)

but the thing works search many answers but the answer was so simpel a tmpfs
all other on the web couldnt make a file lager as 512MB

we needed this for a MySql database of 8 GB the 15K SCSI just wouldnt cut it anymore.
no worries it is for read only purp...

but ofcourse nobody must do testing on a PROD server unless your stupid etc.
that why i added all the warnings for the n00bies who want to crash

Thanks you for this post. This is exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to create a 1G ram disk to use as a live tv buffer with mythtv -- all the other posts(swap on ramdisk) weren't as elegant as this. I have 3 capture cards and I have been seeing choppy video when writing 3 streams(1 stream live tv, 2 streams recording other shows) to my raid 5 storage.

Thanks,
Nate