Solved Is it okay to download video directly on ram?

[Hello]

Hi, I rarely watch movies/tvShows/videos, but when I do: I download it, watch it immediately, and then delete it. (I don't want to watch online)
Some years ago under linux and windows, two of my only ssds went bad under 3 years, which made not wanna use them entirely.
So to maintain good health of storage, I wonder if I can just download them directly under /tmp, which will not only not use storage, but make buffering much faster as it will run on ram?

 

[jbo@]

Hello & Welcome to this FreeBSD forum!

Some years ago under linux and windows, two of my only ssds went bad under 3 years, which made not wanna use them entirely.

I doubt that this was due to videos you store & remove "frequently".
SSDs are way more robust nowdays. I have various SSDs (both consumer & enterprise grade) in use for the better part of 10 years and have yet to experience a single failure.

What I mean to say is: I wouldn't worry about that. Either you have/had bad quality SSDs or some other workload is wearing them down.

You can have a look at your SSDs health data via sysutils/smartmontools.

So to maintain good health of storage, I wonder if I can just download them directly under /tmp, which will not only not use storage, but make buffering much faster as it will run on ram?

/tmp is still backed by non-volatile storage (i.e. your SSDs).
Performance/bandwidth/"speed" should not be a concern for any SSD from the past 15 years either.

 

[Alain De Vos]

I had one SSD 128GB dying hard way after 6months of use. Same brand 512GB works just fine. So you just must be lucky.
Never had a NVME or hard disk dying. You can download always to tmps , that is if you have enough free memory.

 

[Espionage724]

So to maintain good health of storage, I wonder if I can just download them directly under /tmp, which will not only not use storage, but make buffering much faster as it will run on ram?

Sounds like it'd work to me (not sure on tmpfs handling or limits), but should probably have a good amount of RAM and/or avoid swapping.

Could be comparable to streaming videos in browsers and browsers caching the stream to RAM (ideally I haven't checked but Firefox iirc can force everything to RAM vs using disk cache)

 

[Alain De Vos]

You can put .cache on tmpfs.

 

[Hello]

Hello & Welcome to this FreeBSD forum!


I doubt that this was due to videos you store & remove "frequently".
SSDs are way more robust nowdays. I have various SSDs (both consumer & enterprise grade) in use for the better part of 10 years and have yet to experience a single failure.

What I mean to say is: I wouldn't worry about that. Either you have/had bad quality SSDs or some other workload is wearing them down.

You can have a look at your SSDs health data via sysutils/smartmontools.


/tmp is still backed by non-volatile storage (i.e. your SSDs).
Performance/bandwidth/"speed" should not be a concern for any SSD from the past 15 years either.

Thanks for the reply. I was under the impression that all files under /tmp were stored in ram, and not in non-volatile storage. Just out of curiosity, there is no way to only download file in ram and then remove it?

Edit: People run browser profiles etc in ram https://youtux.org/Put Your Browser in RAM.html video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGS6qkjv4oM

 

[SirDice]

I was under the impression that all files under /tmp were stored in ram

Only if you actually configured it that way. It's not by default.

/etc/fstab:

tmpfs                   /tmp            tmpfs   rw,mode=1777    0       0

 

[bob2112]

Thanks for the reply. I was under the impression that all files under /tmp were stored in ram, and not in non-volatile storage. Just out of curiosity, there is no way to only download file in ram and then remove it?

Edit: People run browser profiles etc in ram https://youtux.org/Put Your Browser in RAM.html video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGS6qkjv4oM

The situation is similar, the browser profile stays in memory until the memory is needed elsewhere, if you have an adequate amount it will stay where it is. The main difference is that some video files are very large. I would suggest downloading and playing a file with top running and see how much swap usage increases. Don't do anything else during the test that might cause unrepresentative memory churn.