Ridiculous idea: Cache as ramdisk?

Kip Macy kmacy at fsmware.com
Tue Sep 23 07:12:04 PDT 2003


On solaris and now linux, tmpfs is just that. If it starts to compete with
applications for memory, it will push writes out to swap. So it only uses
as much memory/swap space as what you put in swap. Doesn't MFS require
setting the memory allocation ahead of time?

		-Kip



On Tue, 23 Sep 2003, Justin C. Sherrill wrote:

> J. Kanowitz wrote:
>
> > I'm thinking of wherever writes get buffered before a softupdates
> > commit.  Obviously it'd suck to run completely OOM for careless use
> > of the 'RAM disk,' MFS does a good job anyway, and I barely know what
> > I'm talking about...  But maybe the perspective can be good inspiration
> > for someone even if the idea itself might belong in the dustbin.
>
> I recall seeing a nice writeup somewhere, where someone described how to set
> up a ramdisk for /usr/obj, and therefore speeding the make buildworld
> process way, way up.
>
> Here's a link, though I don't think it's the same one I recall reading.
> http://bsdvault.net/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=53
>
>
>





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