Today I installed unburden-home-dir and I’m very please with it. It’s a simple script that takes care of your temporary files to move them outside your home directory. The main reason why I installed it is to minimize the number of read/writes of iceweasel. My favorite browser is apparently the culprit of 80% of read / write operations on disk even when it is idle… Moving the cache to tmpfs, I hope to reduce the IO on disk and to extend my battery life. Using a SSD I haven’t noticed any remarkable benefits regarding performances, but I hope I’ll manage to squeeze a bit more from my battery.
Installing and configuring unburden-home-dir is straightforward. It is packaged for debian (experimental at the time of writing), and it is very easy to configure. Remember that if you want to have your cache on tmpfs, you need to ether mount a tmpfs-enabled file system somewhere or enable RAMTMP=yes in /etc/default/rcS (default in wheezy).
After installing unburden-home-dir iotop shows a delightful page full of zeros :)
ps: if you use duplicity, remember to specify the option —archive-dir to move the duplicity cache somewhere else…