On Mon, Jul 17, 2000 at 10:29:03AM -0500, Austad, Jay wrote:
> With all of the emails I recieved, I get the impression that I'm going to
> I/O bound instead of processor or memory bound. How much disk will be
> sufficient for the queue? 1GB? More?
>
> I'm just grasping here to figure out the best solution, so bear with me...
> What if I only needed a 1GB queue, and what if that queue was a 1GB ramdisk
> (I can put 2GB of ram in the box)? Linux has support for making a disk in
> memory, putting a filesystem on it and mounting it. Wouldn't this take care
> of I/O problems?
The I/O cost is simply there to protect again machine failure, reboots,
power-loss, OS bugs, that sort of thing. Your memory file system will
be ok if it's battery-backed up and running on a system as reliable as
a hard-disk. Otherwise you increase the chances of losing part of your
queue at some point.
Having said that, you may find the trade-off acceptable. That is putting
the queue in a memory file system and accepting a total queue loss once
every now and and again. If eg, it's advertising email and occassional
losses are tolerable, then this may be a perfectly acceptable
cost/reliability trade-off for you.
Regards.
