[ale] DB's and RAM

[Danny Cox]

Randy,

On Tue, 2002-03-05 at 00:20, Randy Janinda wrote:
> A friend and I were playing with MySQL and ramdisks. We simply moved
> everything from .../mysql/var/ to a tmp path; created the ramdisk and
> mounted in at that directory position then moved everything back.
> Rough but quick. After a restart on the DB and a few tests we found it
> worked. NOW, does anyone have arguements pro or con for this setup and
> can you point me to text that may add or detract from my experiment?
> Also keep in mind, I live in a semi-perfect world were the box never
> gets shutdown or crashes, so the volatility doesn;t seem to be an
> issue.

	That sounds cool!  I'd LOVE a semi-perfect world where the box never
crashes!  But, such would never be the life of a kernel dabler ;-).

	Just For Fun (TM), I made a RAID1 of a disk partition and RAMdisk, just
to see if it worked.  It did.  That way, you get the extra speed of the
RAM, but it's always extant on the drive, too.  It'll be slower than
just the ramdisk by itself, of course.

	I've thought about implementing another MD personality for just this
purpose: a mirror between a ramdisk and a HD partition.  The main
difference would be that it would always favor the ram with both reads
and writes, and just have a thread updating the disk in the background. 
I know at some point it'll saturate, and the disk will again be the
bottleneck, but it may well be a Good Thing!

	Oh, well.  Enough rambling.

-- 
kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the
medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.

Danny


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