This is a follow on from a previous article on creating a ramdisk for /tmp

You probably know google chromium reads and writes a lot to the drive due to caching etc (causing potential problems for SSD owners)

With a few tools we can relocate the userdata and profile to the /tmp ramdisk which will make chromium a lot quicker and also give your harddrive less of a hard time.

You will need to install rsync (would expect most people to have this already). The script:

#!/bin/bash
#
# sync chrome profile to ramdisk on /tmp with seperate user profiles
#
# wp.equk.co.uk
STATIC=chrome
LINK=chromium
PROFILE=/tmp/$USER/chromium
cd ~/.config/
[[ -r $PROFILE ]] || install -dm700 $PROFILE
if [[ `readlink $LINK` != $PROFILE ]]; then
  mv $LINK $STATIC
  ln -s $PROFILE $LINK
fi
if [[ -e $LINK/.unpacked ]]; then
  rsync -av --delete --exclude .unpacked ./$LINK/ ./$STATIC/
else
  rsync -av ./$STATIC/ ./$LINK/
  touch $LINK/.unpacked
fi

Save this script wherever you want (eg /usr/share/bin).

Then you need to add the script to crontab or somewhere on login/logout (you will need it to sync when you logout as on reboot it will be cleared)

You can also download/view this script on my github. Any suggestions on any improvements are appreciated.

Note: Google have added a commandline option within Chrome to set the cache directory and I have a new script which replaces this one.

The new script saves temporary data to the ramdisk which means there is no need to sync any of the data.