Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 2 Aug 2001 13:35:50 -0400
From:      David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca>
To:        Freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   _real_ ram disk needed ...
Message-ID:  <15209.36726.676011.413494@trooper.velocet.net>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
It would seem that the semantics of mfs and md differ signifcantly.
If I write data to mfs, it is only sent to swap if it absolutely must
--- I chalk this upto the allocations it uses operating like process
memory.  If I write to md, the speed at which I write to md (swap
backed) is limited by the speed of the swap device.  It would appear
that only a very limited amount of write buffering is going on.

Now... I'm dealing with a very poorly designed _binary_ application.
It writes out very large sparse matrices to disk (as much as 6G, but
randomly between a few hundred meg and 6 gig).  It is desireable for
the system to _not_ write the blocks in question to disk unless
absolutely necessary.

Is there any way to make this request to the vm system?

For something that fits in memory, the performance of mfs is many
dozens of times faster than md.

Dave.

-- 
============================================================================
|David Gilbert, Velocet Communications.       | Two things can only be     |
|Mail:       dgilbert@velocet.net             |  equal if and only if they |
|http://www.velocet.net/~dgilbert             |   are precisely opposite.  |
=========================================================GLO================

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?15209.36726.676011.413494>