RAM disk.

[Joe Smith]

In article <1990Sep12.084002.5575 at hq.demos.su> dvv at hq.demos.su (Dmitry V. Volodin) writes:
>Folks, does anyone want to discuss the pros and cons of placing the
>swap/pageing area onto the ram disk? :)

I understand the joke, but did you know that Sun has done the opposite?
They have put the ram disk on the swap/paging area.  Actually, it's more
like any page of physical memory can be used for either a swapped-in page
or a tmpfs file system page, first come first served.

Small files stay completely in ram.  Large file spill over into swap space,
but it's still faster than a regular file partition due to not waiting for
synchronized writes to the directory blocks, the bitmap/freelist, superblock,
etc.  It's good for /tmp (but not /usr/tmp unless you have a giant swap space.)

-- 
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