gunzip http response

[spyder]

For now I am using the filesystem, but I am worried of wearing out the SD card by unzipping a file from 300kB -> 5MB every 10 minutes.

Is there a way of doing this in memory? Is there a part of the filesystem in memory?

Code:

--byteArray downloaded from website
io.writefile('/tmp/download.gz', byteArray)
os.execute('gunzip /tmp/download.gz')
local handle = io.popen('/tmp/download')
local firstByte = string.byte(handle:read(1))

Thanks