Swapcache comes to Avalon's rescue

[Matthew Dillon]

    This is a fun little side story.  Avalon's got ~37G worth of release
    related files on it and can't cache the mess in ram so demand is
    causing its one hard drive to become fully saturated.  This in turn
    is having an unfortunate effect on even people doing incremental
    git updates.

    However, not to fear, I came up with a GRAND solution!  Resurrect
    the second drive that had been decomissioned due to a minor media
    error and use it as swap space.  I've set it up as a 32G swap partition
    and used the magic of our swapcache facility to unload the primary
    disk a bit by telling the system to swapcache filesystem metadata
    plus the 2.8.2 ISOs and IMGs.  That appears to have done a fairly
    good job offloading the primary drive.

    So it looks like swapcache is useful even using HDs instead of SSDs
    as a means of managing disk load without necessarily having to resort
    to striping the primary filesystem.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>