>> It works but it is only suitable for occasional or lightweight use. I >> wrote a how-to guide for building such a system; it is here: >> https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/50416.html >> It is a little dated now but still valid. It details some >> optimisations you can do to boost life -- such as using a filesystem >> without journalling, disabling access-time storage and things. These >> help but not much. > I do all of that, plus having logs in memory. I live in hope of > a long life.
[ Personally I use `ext4` and I'm not convinced it performs significantly more writes than `ext2` in most usage patterns (obviously, in theory there's more, but in practice the use of a log allows delaying many other writes, many of which can end up cancel'd before they've had a chance to be performed). ] You may also want to make sure `/tmp` is a tmpfs. Furthermore, you may want to check what's being written to your disk by enabling /proc/sys/vm/block_dump and then looking at your log (obviously, follow the advice above *before*). You may find specific applications that write data "needlessly" every once in a while (I used to symlink some firefox files to /tmp for that reason). Stefan