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Comment by eGQjxkKF6fif | Hacker News Reader

Bigger caches. Making entire RAMFS or tmpfs partitions (filesystems but in RAM) for applications or tinkering with things. https://wiki.debian.org/ramfs , Virtualization / VMs, databases. Loading large files into RAM instead of having to read by row/column on a HD.

I'd rather have more RAM available unused than not have RAM available and need it. Been the general rule of thumb for me for the last 30ish years.

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RAMFS is a genius idea. That solves most of the SD card health and speed issues without needing to get a whole hard drive. I know Puppy[0] and MX Linux[1] were made to run like that too.

[0] https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ [1] https://mxlinux.org/

I used to run a Pi as a Wireguard entrypoint to my home network, I made the filesystem read-only and created a RAM disk and moved logs and any other writes to it to protect the longevity of the uSD, it had the added benefit of security of a read-only FS. I'd remount it r/w occasionally and run updates. It ran flawlessly for years (at a time when I was killing a Sandisk uSD in Pis roughly once per week) until I decommissioned it.

I've been running a public facing weather website on my RPi2 since 2014. I am still on the same SD card since all HTML assets and logs are on tmpfs. The only thing being written to the SD card are entries to the DB once every 5 minutes.

That's pretty sweet.

My suspicion about the many uSD cards I've killed is power issues, power loss, etc. In terms of wear, I don't think a typical Pi would be doing enough to wear them out unless it was being hammered.

Your kernel will already cache all IO in memory.

You can decrease the to-disk syncing to e.g. once per day.

```sysctl.conf vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 86400000 ```

Thanks for this information. That's actually really helpful for me to know in my server administration dealings. I _hate_ disk IO and disk thrash. I was aware of kernel stuff but completed eluded me that I could modify it. I put it to 7200

Good point, but I was more talking about distros designed for a smooth day-to-day experience. A user would probably want something like SquashFS (to save space on the SD card) and ZRAM (to conserve RAM) since all their files would be living there.

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