How to setup a ramdisk in Linux

Firstly, create a new directory, for example;

mkdir /tmp/ramdisk

then change the permissions to 777

chmod 777 /tmp/ramdisk

We can then mount this as follows;

mount -t tmpfs -o size=500M ramdisk /tmp/ramdisk

and unmount as;

umount /tmp/ramdisk

Note on the above, if we have used this, for example for temp tables in mysql as per here, then we must first stop mysql before unmounting.

We should though put this into our /etc/fstab file so that it is mounted automatically at boot time and we can do this by adding the following line;

ramdisk /tmp/ramdisk tmpfs defaults, size=500M 0 0

We can run run df -h to see our new ramdisk