Gentoo Archives: gentoo-performance

From: Bart <scarfboy@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-performance@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-performance] ramdisk
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 14:30:20
Message-Id: b71082d80410220730288e3386@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: RE: [gentoo-performance] ramdisk by Tad Glines
1 Neat, although it would be more practical to simply use your
2 usual RAM, well, pretty much completely analogously to the
3 processor's L2 cache.
4
5 A software solution rather than a hardware one. It probably
6 wouldn't be generally applicable as the filesystem itself would
7 have to support or in fact just implement it, (or the io layer
8 understand specific filesystems, which is just troublesome)
9 but it would be a workable improvement, or just extension to
10 modern filesystems.
11
12
13 > > Hrm... I've been wondering how much of a hard drive relief
14 > > it would be to put the metadata of the top x most accessed
15 > > files or just up to y MB in of it ramdisk. Considering hard
16 > > drive flutter is a major bummer to performance these days,
17 > > doing a flutter for common filesystem *meta*data seems
18 > > rather silly - and a /lot/ of programs stat() way like crazy.
19 >
20 >
21 > This has already been approached. See (http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/conquest) for
22 > details. Basically the mete-data and small files are stored in battery
23 > backed RAM. They showed huge performance increases.
24
25 --
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