Creating RAMDISK

From Jose Nathaniel G. Nengasca

Answered By: Ben Okopnik, Kapil Hari Paranjape, Thomas Adam

Hi there,

I just want to create a RAMDISK of 100MB to use as temporary storage for squid cache files, I am using redhat 8.0, using grub bootloader, with 750MB of RAM, the one on linux focus site is rather old (november 1999) howto. Can someone help me with this?

Respectfully yours,

[Kapil] I think you have something confused here. As I understand it:

Squid creates an object cache in memory and periodically saves objects to disk when it runs out of space in memory.

You want to create a virtual (RAM) disk for squid to use as its disk. Instead why don't you increase the amount of memory available to its in-memory object cache?

[Ben] If you have the kernel sources installed, take a look at "/usr/src/kernel-source-<version>/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs". It's a memory-based file system, and is created (by root) with "mount". Here's an example:

See attached ben-fstab.txt

[Thomas] I think Ben has missed the point. Squid doesn't care for the type of RAM being used. Sure, it needs physical RAM, but this is accessed on-disk by squid's "object cache". It is this that determines how much RAM is being used (see Kapil's answer above).

In /etc/squid.conf you can adjust this by changing:

cache_mem=50MB

to something more appropriate. Don't forget to issue:

squid -k reconfigure

once changes have been made to the file.

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