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View Full Version : [all variants] Best tweaks for fstab to improve SSD performance



23senick
June 26th, 2012, 11:34 PM
I’ve been running xubuntu with some years on Aspire Aspire One with 8GB SSD - now on 12.04. I’ve tweaked fstab to reduce writes to SSD, because SSD writing is slower than HDD and creates frustrating pauses.

I didn’t pick up on the need to format to EXT4 without journaling so my first fstab tweak is data=ordered in this line:

<disc name>/ ext4 noatime,discard,data=ordered,errors=remount-ro 0 1

And I’ll leave it this way unless/until I have a good reason to go for a fresh install, at which point I'd re-format the drive. I also ensured Firefox caches to the tmp file.

However I recently noticed there are two differing sets of advice for additional lines in fstab. I’ve been using

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
none /var/tmp aufs noatime,br:/tmp=rw:/var/tmp=ro 0 0
none /var/log aufs noatime,br:/tmp=rw:/var/log=ro 0 0
none /var/cache aufs noatime,br:/tmp=rw:/var/cache=ro 0 0

I still seem to get some pauses while there is writing to the hard disk. The following are the alternative lines I’ve recently noticed in some posts.

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/spool tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0


How do these two options differ? Both appear to claim to have the same effect (stopping writing logs to SSD). Which is best?

Thoughts anyone?