unburden-home-dir 0.3.1 (i386 binary) in ubuntu quantal
unburden-home-dir allows users to move cache files from browsers,
etc. off their home directory, i.e. on a local harddisk or tmpfs and
replace them with a symbolic link to the new location (e.g. on /tmp/
or /scratch/) upon login. Optionally the contents of the directories
and files can be removed instead of moved.
.
This is helpful at least in the following cases:
.
The idea-giving case are big workstation setups where $HOME is on NFS
and all those caches put an unnecessary burden (hence the name) on
the file server since caching over NFS doesn't have the best
performance and may clog the NFS server, too.
.
A similar case, but with different purpose is reducing I/O on mobile
devices like laptops or netbooks to extend the battery life: Moving
browser caches etc. off the real disk into a tmpfs filesystem reduces
the amount of disk I/O which reduces the power consumption of the
disk.
.
Another possible solution for saving non-crucial I/O is using the
package eatmydata to ignore a software's fsync calls.
.
The other type of use cases for unburden-home-dir is to reduce disk
space usage, e.g. on devices with small disk space but a lot of RAM
as seen often on boxes with flash disks or early netbooks, especially
the EeePC, where configurations with 4GB disk space and 2GB RAM are
not seldom. In this case you want to move off as many cache files,
etc. as possible to some tmpfs filesystem, e.g. /tmp/.
.
It may also help to reduce the amount of needed backup disk space by
keeping those files in places where they don't get backed up. In that
case it's an alternative to keeping the blacklist in your backup
software up-to-date.
.
The package also contains an Xsession hook which calls this script on
X login for every user. But by default no files or directories are
configured to be moved elsewhere, so nothing will happen
automatically without configuration.
Details
- Package version:
- 0.3.1
- Status:
- Obsolete
- Component:
- universe
- Priority:
- Extra
Downloadable files
- unburden-home-dir_0.3.1_all.deb (17.9 KiB)
Package relationships
- Recommends:
- Pre-Depends on:
- Enhances: