I used to run mac servers in what now can only be described as the days of yore... when a 32GB RAM bank cost a lot more than a (spinning) disk - and those were expensive then too. SSDs were not here yet. I haven't checked pricing lately, but I'd think you could put 256GB of RAM into a server for probably about the same as a 1TB SSD, and that would offer plenty of build space when used as a RAM drive. And that space will not degrade over time (unlike the SSD). In terms of longevity, for a machine with such a singularly targeted use case, I'd seriously consider taking the expense now, and have a server that lives for another decade.
Dr Balthasar Indermühle Inside Systems Pty Ltd 5007/101 Bathurst Street Sydney NSW 2000, Australia t: +61 (0)405 988 500 On Sun, 14 Mar 2021 at 21:04, Ryan Schmidt <ryandes...@macports.org> wrote: > There was some additional downtime in the last few days but the > buildmaster now has a permanent home on a new SSD and is faster than ever. > Builds that could not be scheduled during recent downtime have been > rescheduled and are in progress. > > > On Mar 14, 2021, at 04:02, Vincent Habchi wrote: > > > Wouldn’t it make sense to use some sort of RAM caching to speed up > builds instead of SSD? What’s the point of using a permanent storage device > for something that is bound to be erased in a very short time? > > RAM would be faster than SSD but also a lot more expensive. Certainly I > know or can figure out how to create a RAM disk, and certainly we could > tell MacPorts to store the build directory there. But if we ran out of > space on the RAM disk during a build, the build would fail. Some builds > need a lot of disk space -- I've seen ports that use 20GB of disk space to > build. Instead of buying 20GB or more of additional RAM per VM, I've chosen > to buy 90GB of SSD per VM. > > If you're suggesting that we should just set aside 1-2GB of RAM for build > files and use the SSD if we need more space than that, then I don't know > how to set that up. > > Note that macOS already caches disk files in RAM if there is any free RAM. > >