Gigabyte recently (Aug 25th ) announced a $50 battery protected PCI/SATA ramdisk card. text below copied from the announcement. I am going to try one of these.
"The card is a regular 32-bit PCI card that features four standard DIMM slots on board. The card also features a custom Gigabyte FPGA that is programmed to act as a SATA to DDR translator, which convinces the SATA controller you connect the card to that the memory you have on that card is no different than a regular SATA HDD. As long as you have memory on the card, the card will be available at POST as an actual SATA drive, with no additional drivers necessary. The card is powered via the PCI slot, but RAM is volatile and thus if no power is provided to the card then all of the data is lost. In order to make this solution more realistic for real-world usage, Gigabyte outfitted the card with a rechargeable battery pack that can keep the memory powered and data intact for up to 16 hours with no power. After that 16 hours is up, your data is lost, but as soon as you apply power to the card again the battery pack will begin to recharge. " This is an interesting way to implement a ramdisk. The PCI slot is just controlling the card and providing power (including recharging the battery), but the card plugs into a SATA controller and appears as a standard HDD. John Scully ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mack" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 1:02 PM Subject: Going OT For David - RE: [Mimedefang] mail server performence declain > > Probably, mind you, I don't use a ram based spool, but my reasoning is the > limiting factor on email sizes (yes i still have to be able to process msgs > up to 1GB (don't ask) and i run 25 threads, so that would be an expensive > ram disk !! > > However, I still see sub 1/2 second process times on emails even with 3 av > engines and spamassissin (with a huge ruleset) running, even when almost all > threads are loaded :) > > But then I rely on the load average creeping up, and sendmail rejecting > connections (due to having set the reject LA quite low) which the Load > balancer then distributes to other boxes. So even a biggie email doesn't > clog the system > > Also a nice 15k Raid 5 (for the local processing) does help > > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of David > F. Skoll > Sent: 19 September 2005 17:50 > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Mimedefang] mail server performence declain > > > Mack wrote: > > I'll repost this, as it may help > > Based on the OP's article, I bet he's not using a RAM disk, which > will of course kill performance. > > See http://www.mimedefang.org/kwiki/index.cgi?RamBasedSpoolDirectory > > -- > David. > _______________________________________________ > Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.roaringpenguin.com > MIMEDefang mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang > > This Email Has Been Anti-Virus Scanned > > _______________________________________________ > Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.roaringpenguin.com > MIMEDefang mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang > > _______________________________________________ Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.roaringpenguin.com MIMEDefang mailing list [email protected] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
