Use ram instead of disk, write to disk at shutdown

[Icovada]

I have a netbook I'm not using and which I transformed into a server with Apache, Tomcat6, Netatalk, Webmin, BIND9 and Tor.

Problem is, the disks never stop spinning because all of the programs write a few kb at least every few seconds to disk, even when nobody is connected to it.

My question is: Is there a way to have the computer boot from disk like normal (maybe even a squashfs), keep ALL CHANGES to ram and then save to disk when either the ram is full (unlikely because the server is rebooted every few days) or at shutdown?

I thought about a mixture of ramfs and unionfs but I'm not good enough yet...
Anybody have any ideas?

[An Sanct]

Welcome to the forums!

Here's a way to get firefox cache (and other programs...) into ram (http://ubuntuguide.net/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-cache-into-ram-in-ubuntu), also you can move all your logs and tem files to ram (http://www.fewt.com/2010/07/move-your-logs-and-temp-files-to-ram.html) to make the disk stop spinning all the time.

Warning: You can lose all the logs or modified data this way!

[Icovada]

Thank you, but is there a way to keep ALL changes into ram and write them at shutdown? (or every, say, half an hour?)

[An Sanct]

The write "down on shutdown - using cron to sync" is covered in this Firefox sample (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Speed-up_Firefox_using_tmpfs). Note, that this is only a Firefox sample, other applications can work this way too.

[Icovada]

Awesome, I'll try it tomorrow morning. Too tired right now!