Very Computer

by **Peter Wec** » Mon, 13 Apr 1998 04:00:00

Is there a way to create a large ramdisk (~150 Meg) to store temporary
files? I'm reading and writing to large number of temporary files and
would like to do it all in RAM rather than on the disk. I realize that
Linux caches the reads, but the writes are flushed to disk, thus
limiting the performance.

I am running on RedHat 5.0 with a 2.0.33 kernel.

Thanks,
-Peter Weck

by **Peter A Fei** » Mon, 13 Apr 1998 04:00:00

> Is there a way to create a large ramdisk (~150 Meg) to store temporary
> files? I'm reading and writing to large number of temporary files and
> would like to do it all in RAM rather than on the disk. I realize that
> Linux caches the reads, but the writes are flushed to disk, thus
> limiting the performance.

If you're going to be writing temp files to ram, why not just store
the stuff in variables to begin with? You don't have the overhead of
going through the ramdisk driver in that case.

--
Peter Fein
1005 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
773-834-6206

http://pfein.home.ml.org/

by **Bill Eldridg** » Tue, 14 Apr 1998 04:00:00

Yes, you can follow the instructions in
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/ramdisk.*

You may have to edit /usr/src/linux/drivers/block/rd.c
and change a line to:

/* int rd_size = 32768; /* Size of the ramdisks */
int rd_size = 163840 /* Five times 32 Megs */

or there may be a way to pass in the ramdisk size
from LILO.

Bill

> Is there a way to create a large ramdisk (~150 Meg) to store temporary
> files? I'm reading and writing to large number of temporary files and
> would like to do it all in RAM rather than on the disk. I realize that
> Linux caches the reads, but the writes are flushed to disk, thus
> limiting the performance.

> I am running on RedHat 5.0 with a 2.0.33 kernel.

> Thanks,
> -Peter Weck

by **Peter Wec** » Tue, 14 Apr 1998 04:00:00

>> Is there a way to create a large ramdisk (~150 Meg) to store temporary
>> files? I'm reading and writing to large number of temporary files and
>> would like to do it all in RAM rather than on the disk. I realize that
>> Linux caches the reads, but the writes are flushed to disk, thus
>> limiting the performance.

> If you're going to be writing temp files to ram, why not just store
> the stuff in variables to begin with? You don't have the overhead of
> going through the ramdisk driver in that case.

I'm going to be exporting the ramdisk as an NFS mount and multiple
machines are going to be sharing the temporary space. Right now, using
a regular ext2 partition, the performance is very slow.

-Peter Weck

by **Christopher Michael Coon** » Wed, 15 Apr 1998 04:00:00

:
: I'm going to be exporting the ramdisk as an NFS mount and multiple
: machines are going to be sharing the temporary space. Right now, using
: a regular ext2 partition, the performance is very slow.
:

Then you need more ram. Or you've got bad rsize, wsize parameters.
8k should get 5-600k over ethernet (from a 386 even)
--

Walking through the ba*t of Fuller Labs wearing futuristic body
armor and pushing a variable-geometry motorcycle raises eyebrows.
Telling students that this is the true power of UNIX doesn't help. -UF

Very Computer

Linux ramdisk for temporary files

Linux ramdisk for temporary files

Linux ramdisk for temporary files

Linux ramdisk for temporary files

Linux ramdisk for temporary files

Linux ramdisk for temporary files