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I am here to sell you on one word: ramdisks.

If you are doing processing with intermediate steps you do not want to keep? Ramdisks. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

This seems to be very forgotten tech. First time I used that was to load NetHack to ram instead of the slow diskette on my Atari. Now I still use it as webcache for work to not bother the database with so many requests.

When I set up the server, the ramdisk didn't have a way of shrinking when space wasn't needed so had to make sure it doesn't eat up all memory when growing unlimited. I bet it's smarter nowadays.

Not forgotten at all -- in fact, if your system has has a /tmp directory, it is almost certainly a RAMdisk.

Ok, but it was very forgotten in my circles when I suggested we use a ramdisk. Ours was at /dev/shm/ I think. Noone had heard of ramdisks and sounded a bit skeptical but the server is still running and no problems with sluggish pages any more.

Ramdisks are so very handy now when you can have much more than 512 kB ram... :-)

Slow ffmpeg pipelines are typically cpu-bound rather than io-bound.

e.g. When doing a simple copy, progress status messages upgrade to scientific notation.

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