Intro
Always on the lookout to decrease writes on my consumer SSDs, I stumbled upon the idea of a ramdisk for Plex transcodes. In theory it should offer a performance boost, but in practice I did not really notice any improvements besides lowering SSD writes.
Editing fstab
Navigate to /etc/fstab and open it for edition. You should see your boot disk and any other mapped media there. Add the following line:
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid,size=<SIZE IN GB> 0 0The size can be as much as half of your total available RAM. Also, you can technically mount it in any directory, just make sure it exists beforehand. After editing your fstab, you can just issue the command mount -a using a privileged user and the ramdisk will be mounted.
Editing the Plex server config
Navigate to the plex server settings -> transcoder, and under the temporary directory, write the location of your ram disk, e.g. /dev/shm.
It should look like the featured image.
Done!
The next transcoder playback should utilize the ram disk and avoid unnecesary disk writes!