Loading ...What is /dev/shm and its practical usage
/dev/shm is nothing but implementation of traditional shared memory concept. It is an efficient means of passing data between programs. One program will create a memory portion, which other processes (if permitted) can access. This will result into speeding up things on Linux.
shm / shmfs is also known as tmpfs, which is a common name for a temporary file storage facility on many Unix-like operating systems. It is intended to appear as a mounted file system, but one which uses virtual memory instead of a persistent storage device.
If you type mount command you will see /dev/shm as a tempfs file system. Therefore, it is a file system, which keeps all files in virtual memory. Everything in tmpfs is temporary in the sense that no files will be created on your hard drive. If you unmount a tmpfs instance, everything stored therein is lost. By default almost all Linux distros configured to use /dev/shm.
Nevertheless, where can I use /dev/shm?
You can use /dev/shm to improve the performance of application software or overall Linux system performance. On heavily loaded system, it can make tons of difference. For example VMware workstation/server can be optimized to improve your Linux host's performance (i.e. improve the performance of your virtual machines).
For example, if you have 8GB RAM then remount /dev/shm as follows:
# mount -o remount,size=8G /dev/shm
To be frank, if you have more than 2GB RAM + multiple Virtual machines, this hack always improves performance.
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=5G,nr_inodes=5k,mode=700 tmpfs /disk2/tmpfs
Above will give you tmpfs instance on /disk2/tmpfs which can allocate 5GB RAM/SWAP in 5K inodes and it is only accessible by root.
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Tags: mount_command, shared_memory, shm, system_performance, virtual_machines, virtual_memory, vmware_workstation
Very good Description.
I want to know the concept of /dev/shm in FreeBSD.
I cannot see where allocating an 8G ram disk on a machine with 8G of physical ram is a good thing. The OS will start swapping out the ram disk pages long before you fill it up, slowing the whole system to a crawl.
I you have 32G add 8G for virtual machine. I’m not asking to allocate all ram.
HTH
I don’t quite understand why u need the tmpfs thing - if u have that much of memory, just write direct to memory, why set up swapspace and then write to swapspace via tmpfs?
Similarly question for /dev/shm?
Is it because of 4GB limit for memory - in 32bit OS scenario?