Optimizing stable pages

Posted Dec 6, 2012 20:58 UTC (Thu) by bjencks (subscriber, #80303)
In reply to: Optimizing stable pages by dlang
Parent article: Optimizing stable pages

If you're truly not worried about data integrity, why not just add all that disk space as swap and use tmpfs? (I haven't tried this; it could be that it actually works terribly, but it seems like it *should* be the optimal solution)

Optimizing stable pages

Posted Dec 6, 2012 21:18 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> If you're truly not worried about data integrity, why not just add all that disk space as swap and use tmpfs?

swap has horrible data locality, depending on how things get swapped out a single file could end up scattered all over the disk.

In addition, you approach puts the file storage directly competing with all processes in terms of memory, you may end up swapping out program data because your file storage 'seems' more important.

disk caching has a similar pressure, but the kernel knows that cache data is cache, and that it can therefor be thrown away if needed. tmpfs data isn't in that category.