[Xitami] running server on RAM drive

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <03c001c0f2b0$8dfb0ca0$a600a8c0@Michael>, "Michael S. Kazarin" writes:
>I'm running Xitami 2.5b5 on w2k sp2.
>I've setup RAM drive recently, and consider putting web server pages on it
>to speed up access a bit. Is it worth it and are there any limitations?

The main limitation is that obviously you can't keep the master copy of
things on your ram drive, as it will go away when you reboot :-)  Which
means you've got to handle copying things into the ram drive on startup,
and making sure you copy anything you want to keep off before you reboot
(which is a pain if you are forced to reboot without shutting down
cleanly).

As to whether it is worth it, that is a much harder question these days:
modern OS (and W2K is modern enough for this purpose) cache things that
have been read from the disk pretty well.  So that things which are
being used are kept in memory (in the disk cache) even if their
permanent home is on a real disk.

So basically a ram disk is betting that you know better than the OS what
is being used a lot: it certainly used to be true with DOS, but it's
far less true with a modern OS.  Usually the ram is better just left for
the OS to use for caching; but experiment and see what you think.
Remember that ram you take for the ram drive won't be available for
running programs; which if you have limited ram can force the machine to
swap, which is rather... bad.

Ewen

-- 
Ewen McNeill, Technical Consultant, iMatix Corporation  www.imatix.com