----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthias Julius" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 5:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Tilesathome] Using RAM-drive for ROMA temp tables


> Florian Lohoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 02:55:07PM -0500, Milenko wrote:
>>> Hey all,
>>>
>>>                 Has anyone played with using a ramdrive to store the 
>>> temp
>>> tables in map.fcgi?  There are 6 different temp tables used to store 
>>> data
>>> before it's dumped to the client.  I wonder if there would be a 
>>> significant
>>> speed increase if these could be stored in RAM instead of on disk.  The
>>> script creates a "mirrored" tablespace before creating the temp tables, 
>>> if
>>> this tablespace where to point to a filesystem in RAM would that 
>>> accomplish
>>> this?  I currently have it set to a separate directory on disk, but 
>>> nothing
>>> is ever created there so I'm not sure if it's actually being used to
>>> anything.
>>
>> I tried with a different tablespace on seperate speedy disks and it
>> didnt make a difference as the linux kernel is clever enough to
>> not let these short lived tables hit the disk
>
> That't what I would have guessed, too.  If you have enough RAM to
> create a RAM drive the kernel also has enough memory to cache the data
> if you leave the memory to the kernel instead.
>
> Matthias

I can confirm this.  I went ahead and mounted a ram-drive using tmpfs.  Then 
created a new tablespace located there.  I changed map.fcgi to use 
temp_tablespaces instead of default_tablespace and pointed it at the new 
tablespace.  Pgsql is using the space, but I see no difference in 
performance.  When monitoring the disk-based tablespace, it doesn't appear 
pgsql is even storing files there, so the kernel must be caching them 
automagically.

I guess the only performance option is to throw more discs in the array.  I 
hoped the 4 10k rpm velociraptors would hold up better than they are. 
Iostat shows 250 - 300% i/o wait during heavy load with 7 - 8 instances. 
Everything else looks good - the system is just sitting waiting for the 
discs.

Maybe 8 of the new Intel SSDs in RAID0 would speed things up...  :)

-Jeremy




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