On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:57:06 -0600, Tom Shilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > You don't mean to use VDISK for that, do you? > > That is what I meant but I have been educated. Real storage is too > valuable to spend on /tmp. It was easy for me to ask because it's so intuitive, and I hope I did not sound as if that were the most stupid idea... For most people VDISK is cheap because it does not require talking to the person who manages the disks. As we know VDISK will eventually land on CP paging devices and the disks for that are about the same cost as any other disk space (about the same, because you want to keep paging utilization under 50% to allow for efficient block paging). So it did seem like a good idea because you share the unused space in your /tmp allocation among all Linux servers. One of the things that makes this work out less well in the end is the allocation strategy of Linux on that file system. Instead of re-using freed blocks, it will prefer to allocate fresh blocks, so over time you will have touched every block in your /tmp file system. That is not nice in a shared environment. And as you say there is the issue of using real memory for the data. But with MDC and Linux page cache doing that, you can not always avoid that. http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg21730.html YMMV: I am sure we can come up with examples where using VDISK for /tmp is a huge benefit... -- Rob van der Heij rvdheij @ gmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
