EDIT: To follow this tutorial it is necessary to have rsync and curl installed, 95% of linux systems will already have it installed. Just make sure they are.
Let's begin this post saying that this is not suited for computers with SDDs, since the difference it's probably minimal and for computers with less than 4GiB of ram. It is also not suited for projects with no large databases such as Universe@home or NFS@home.
Now let's explain what we are gonna do. A lot of projects bring with themselves large files with important data, as it can be seen in the projects folder. work-units need to access to do their work. Depending on the work-unit, and your harddrive, it can be a significant bottleneck . Linux has the ability to easily and transparently allow to store files in RAM, using something called tmpfs. Because we wish for our work to not be temporary, but permanent, we will use a script that periodically stores the changes on the HDD .
Let's start. . All the following opperations require root so be sure to be in root mode. I also adapted the commands so if there are differences between distributions you can use them in copypaste anyway. Cause i'm nice. But it will output some errs that you can harmlessly ignore.
You most likely have boinc set-up to auto start with systemd . And the service it's named either boinc or boinc-client. We must disable it with
systemctl disable boinc & systemctl disable boinc-client
We will start working on systemctl units now so it's better to switch to the systemd directory.
cd /usr/lib/systemd/system
Now, to work on the Boinc service
mv boinc* boinc-ram.service
And now we need to edit it. I recommend nano but you may use any file editor you want .
nano boinc-ram.service
It should be looking like this :
And we must edit it so it looks like this :
Now, with the boinc settings settled, we must move on to our persistence manager.
First we create the directory
mkdir /var/lib/boinc/ram
now we define it in fstab, so it is mounted at boot.
echo "tmpfs /var/lib/boinc/ram tmpfs nodev,nosuid 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
Now. We need a script that moves files in and files our. We will call it boinc-prst.sh
You can check it out here : https://pastebin.com/raw/uNbmb05w . It's easy to understand, first it copies all the files to the ramdisk, then , every 60 seconds it updates the files in the HDD with the ones on the ramdisk. You may change that value if you wish.
To download it , we run :
curl -L https://pastebin.com/raw/uNbmb05w > /usr/local/bin/boinc-prst.sh
And we make it executable
chmod 644 /usr/local/bin/boinc-prst.sh
Now we must create a systemd service for it.. Again i created it for you : https://pastebin.com/raw/JQ2w7XU7
curl -L https://pastebin.com/raw/JQ2w7XU7 > /usr/lib/systemd/system/boinc-prst.service
And now we must activate boinc. systemd dependency resolutor should take care of the rest
systemctl enable boinc-ram
Now reboot and done are we.