In general, increasing access speed (latency and throughput) is the idea of having tmpfs
. Instead of flushing to hard disk all the time, the file system will try to keep all the content in RAM, which leads to very low latency compared to a normal disk-based file system. Obviously once you run out of RAM, it has to resort to using an on-disk swap file.
This blog post describes using tmpfs
to improve the speed of serving websites, and goes into a lot of technical detail if you're interested: 30x Faster Cache and Site Speed with TMPFS