Thread: Calibre Speedup
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Old 10-23-2012, 09:19 PM   #33
unboggling
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal View Post
I'm not an OS X user so I can't help. Basically you need to find out where /tmp points to and ensure that location is mounted in RAM.
On OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 the symlink /tmp points to /private/tmp. Another symlink /var points to /private/var. The shell script discussed above mounts /private/tmp as ramdisk. So if calibre conversion temp files go to /tmp and /tmp is really /private/tmp, that means they should have gone to the /private/tmp ramdisk and sped up the conversion. But the only calibre temp files I noticed end up in directories in /private/var/folders/2x81rgjj3lq_2r6wv3_xdkrm0000gn/T/

Edit: But I'm Unix-ignorant and possibly missed something.

Quote:
Originally Posted by itimpi View Post
On Windows and Linux (and I presume on MacOS as well) you can over-ride Calibre using the system /tmp by setting the CALIBRE_TEMP environment variable to point to where you want Calibre to put its temporary files. This might save you doing some research and shoudl certainly be quick to try?
Thanks!!! Hopefully that will work. So the setup would be as follows. At computer startup create a ramdisk mounted on a directory with appropriate permissions. Startup calibre with another shell script that sets CALIBRE_TEMP environment variable to that same directory.

I haven't done shell programming for 20 years, so it may take me awhile but it seems doable. I can try to adapt from these calibre startup batch files a search of the forum turned up, previously posted by itimpi and DoctorOhh.

Edit: What is an appropriate size for a ramdisk devoted to calibre temp files?

Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe View Post
...I think 20 or 30 seconds is the norm and that is better than good enough.

But... speed of converting books is slightly more important to me than how fast my OS loads or a program loads….
You're welcome. My conversions EPUB to MOBI average about 25 seconds too, with SSD, but without the temp files to ramdisk, using the performance settings mentioned in post #2 of this thread. The primary reason I upgraded to SSD and more RAM was that I decided to delay buying a new computer for a year or so, so this was just to tide me over, as a psychological sop so I wouldn't buy a new computer now. The upgrades really weren't necessary for performance.

Last edited by unboggling; 10-23-2012 at 10:24 PM. Reason: clarify
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