<b>Move your PHP sessions off the disk</b>

<b>Move your PHP sessions off the disk</b>

Every logged-in pageview writes a tiny session file to disk. On cheap VPS SSDs that's thousands of pointless writes burning your I/O and IOPS budget. Put them in RAM:

— <code>mount -t tmpfs -o size=128M tmpfs /var/lib/php/sessions</code>
— add it to <code>/etc/fstab</code> so it survives reboot

Sessions are throwaway data anyway; if the box reboots, everyone re-logs, who cares. Disk I/O on my forum box dropped 60%. Same trick works for nginx's proxy cache. Try it tonight.