Calibre Speedup

[Adoby]

Usually the normal disc cache will do a good job to improve the perceived speed of /tmp automatically. This also makes it difficult to benchmark the differences between /tmp on a ramdisk or on a normal disc. You may get different results each time you run a benchmark depending on how files are already present in the disc caches.

Also note that books are exploded and put together again on /tmp not only when you do an explicit conversion, but every time you save a book to device or to disc.

The actual benefit of using ramdisk will depend on the relationship between things like memory use, speed of memory, cpu processing power, speed of discs. If you have plenty of fast memory and a lot of processing power, then the speed of the discs may slow down things, and you may benefit from using a ramdisk. I have an 8 core CPU and 16GB fast memory, but use SATA 2 discs, SSD and mechanical, so for me the benefits are obvious.

I use linux and there it is very easy to create and use tempfs for /tmp. I just added a line of text to /etc/fstab. And tempfs will then by default dynamically use up to half of the available RAM for /tmp, if needed also virtual memory from the swap partitions. Another benefit is that /tmp is automatically emptied every time you reboot. I have had problems (not recently) with calibre crashing during conversions and leaving a lot of junk files in /tmp.

Also you may benefit from using tempfs for other things. I use it to store the cache for Firefox. Works great.