incoming directory

[John Rudd]

On Monday, Nov 25, 2002, at 13:06 US/Pacific, Nerijus Baliunas wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 19:10:33 +0000 Julian Field
> <mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK> wrote:
>
>> By putting the directories into a ramdisk, you are forcing the OS to
>> use a
>> fixed amount of ram for this. In general, it is better to leave the
>> OS to
>> manage system resources itself, as it's usually better at it than the
>> "fixed" value you give by having it in a ram disk.
>
> Linux 2.4 has tmpfs filesystem, which does not have ramdisk problems.
> For
> example, User-mode Linux can place virtual memory files in tmpfs:
>
> Instead, we can use 'tmpfs' which is a dynamic RAM based file system.
> tmpfs only uses the memory it needs, so unlike ramfs, we don't have to
> set aside a whole chunk of RAM from the word go.

[snip]

That's largely how it works in Solaris as well (the platform I'm
using).  Some people use tmpfs and ramdisk interchangeably.

In my case, I have 1GB of RAM on those machines.  I was thinking of
having the incoming work dir set mounted in tmpfs, and limit the size
of that tmpfs to 400ish mb.