Speeding Up Nginx Caching With tempfs

If you’ve done anything with optimizing the speed of websites, you know that caching is a must. It basically means you’re creating a page once, and then using it multiple times—as opposed to having to create it every time someone asks for it.

So caching is good, is what I’m saying.

Caching 2.0 ​

There’s a caching superpower that you can employ that most people aren’t aware of: caching to memory instead of to disk.

Whether you’re using a caching plugin, or doing opcode caching, or using fast-cgi caching (or all three), you should be writing your cache files to a directory that lives in tempfs.

What’s tempfs ​

tempfs is a filesystem in memory. Most modern Linux distros have it on by default, actually:

• In CentOS your default tempfs directory is /dev/shm

• In Ubuntu your default tempfs directory is /var/run

So, whatever you’re using to create cache files, make use of your Linux distro’s built-in memory-based file system.