Ram disk with real disk "overflow"

[Jack Jansen]

In article <347 at oce-rd3.UUCP> grol at oce-rd3.UUCP (Geert Rolf) writes:
>In article <6882 at boring.UUCP> jack at mcvax.UUCP (Jack Jansen) writes:
>>Something I've been thinking of (but never came around to doing) is to
>>make a device of wich the first bit (say, .5Mb) is RAM disk, and the
>>rest is real disk.
>
>What do you want, Jack?? Another name/implementation for the disc-cache?
>
The point is, writing data to a real disk will eventually result
in a write operation. Even if your buffer cache is big, update
will force everything out to disk every minute or so.
If you can prevent this, that's nice. This is especially true for
files in /tmp. On your average file system, there are about three
times as many reads as writes. On /tmp, however, there are 1.2 reads
for every write.
Another way of achieving more-or-less the same result is giving the
buffer cache some knowledge about files (so it doesn't write blocks
belonging to files that are gone already). Finding 42 good reasons for
not doing this is left to the reader.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack at mcvax.UUCP
	The shell is my oyster.