Linux: writing status often to a small file, where?

Question

I want this program of mine to expose its status for others to read. The first thing that comes to my mind is to write this to a file, but the flow of my program makes it convenient to update this status several times a second which makes it stupid to write it to disk every time.

Is there for example a way of storing this file in memory only, available on the file system without manually mounting a ramdisk somewhere?

My program is written in Python, those reading its status could be anything.

This almost seems like it might belong on http://programmers.stackexchange.com/. — Zoredache, Mar 14 '12 at 20:53
It won't be physically written to the disk very often, because it is staying in filesystem cache. Just write a file several times per second. Trust the kernel for caching and sync-ing to disk (which you could force with `sync()` or `fsync()`...) — Basile Starynkevitch, Mar 15 '12 at 06:34

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 20:49

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Why not have your program open a Unix or Network Socket, and build some kind of interface to allow systems to connect and request the status as needed?

answered Mar 14 '12 at 20:49

Zoredache

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 22:31

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Anything in /dev/shm, it's in ram so it's fast, and no syncing issues.

answered Mar 14 '12 at 22:31

Marcin

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 14 '12 at 21:06

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What about creating a shared memory segment and opening that with your programs? One thing, all people sharing the shared memory segment MUST be on the same system.

answered Mar 14 '12 at 21:06

mdpc

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Linux: writing status often to a small file, where?

3 Answers3