How to not use your hard disk

How to not use your hard disk

Posted Mar 14, 2008 20:22 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: How to not use your hard disk by rvfh
Parent article: How to use a terabyte of RAM

So the goal is to eliminate writes to disk of data that will probably never be read back? Do you have a problem with too much disk I/O? Is it slowing down other I/O?

Some filesystems (none on Linux that I know of) have, for this reason, an attribute of a file or file image "delayed write," which means don't bother to harden writes to disk until the OS finds a better use for the memory or there's an orderly shutdown. And some policy engine that can set the attribute based on file name.

On Linux, I'd probably make those directories symlinks to directories in a tmpfs filesystem. Not ramfs, because the memory manager can probably do a better job than my static policy at determining when the memory can be better used for something else.

---

(Log in to post comments)

This is exactly it! I might do the symlink trick, but I would really like to have that
per-file delayed write option...

Thanks!