Put Brave Browser Cache in RAM

The Brave browser is constantly writing large amounts of data to its cache, which is a concern when your storage device is an SSD. The solution is to put Brave’s cache on a RAM disk, i.e., a tmpfs device on Linux. Some Linux distros, like Arch, mount /tmp as tmpfs, but Linux Mint 21 does not.

Mount /tmp as tmpfs

So the first step on Mint is to change /tmp to tmpfs. This can be done with systemd instead of creating a mount point in /etc/fstab. Run this command to create the tmp.mount systemd service:

sudo cp /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system

By default, this service creates a /tmp RAM disk that takes up half of all available RAM. To create a specific size of RAM disk, edit the file /etc/systemd/system/tmp.mount using sudo and your favorite editor, then change the size parameter in the Options line. As an example, here is what the Options line looks like for a 1GB /tmp file system:

Options=mode=1777,strictatime,nosuid,nodev,size=1g,nr_inodes=1m

Then enable the tmp.mount service:

sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount

I rebooted after this step, but you can also start the service without rebooting:

sudo systemctl start tmp.mount

Verify that /tmp is now mounted as tmpfs:

mount | grep /tmp

The output should look something like this:

tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=1048576,inode64)

Move Brave cache to /tmp

Shut down Brave before proceeding. Then remove the existing Brave cache, and symlink the cache to /tmp

cd ~/.cache
rm -rf BraveSoftware
ln -s /tmp BraveSoftware

After restarting Brave, you should now see its cache on /tmp

ls -laF /tmp/Brave-Browser

Occasionally check to see how close /tmp is to filling up:

df -h /tmp

If it’s getting full, tell Brave to clear its cache (in Settings / Privacy and security / Clear browsing data).