Thursday, July 01, 2010

HOWTO : Ask Firefox and Ubuntu Desktop to use RamDisk

If you have 2GB or more of memory (at least 2GB RAM is recommended), you can try to use ramdisk to boost the performance of Firefox and Ubuntu Desktop. The following tutorial is only applied for Ubuntu Desktop version. Please do not use in Server version.

Step 1 :

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Append the following to the file /etc/fstab

tmpfs /var/log/apt tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0


Step 2 :

Add "norelatime" to (for example) :

UUID=8b0a54f0-b16c-49c9-a639-c2202f2909da / ext4 errors=remount-ro,norelatime 0 1

Step 3 :

Save and exit. Then issue the following command to see if there is any error. If there is an error, please go back to Step 1 and 2. Please DO NOT reboot when there is an error.

sudo mount -a
sudo mount -o remount /


Step 4 :

If no error, please reboot your system.

Step 5 :

Open Firefox and enter "about:config". Confirmed the warning and right click on any blank.

"Add" --> "String", then enter "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory". Press enter and then enter "/tmp".

Step 6 :

Restart Firefox.

Done!

That's all! See you.