richard lucassen wrote:

On Wed, 8 Nov 2017 11:35:40 +0100 richard lucassen mailinglists@lucassen.org wrote:

...

Is there a way to limit these disk writes? I didn't touch the standard Ubuntu settings, except for the usual settings like SSL.

I found an old setting that seems to do the job:

shm_key 100

In that old setting it was set to 100, the man page says:

shm_key _integer_ Specify a key for a shared memory BDB environment. By default the BDB environment uses memory mapped files. If a non-zero value is specified, it will be used as the key to identify a shared memory region that will house the environment.

Is that integer a sort of label or does it mean something else?

It means what it says - it is a shared memory key. Read the ipcs(1) manpage.