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  • From: Phil/CERisE/KG6MBQ <cerise AT littlegreenmen.armory.com>
  • To: Source Mage Discuss <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] tmpfs
  • Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2002 16:12:58 -0700 (PDT)

Laurent Wandrebeck said:

> hi ppl !
> please note that I may have had a completely stupid idea :)
> Even if tmpfs is a bit slower than using disk space, i think
> that limiting fragmentation is a Good Idea (tm). i've been wondering
> if the use of ramdisk wouldn't be better. doc says that it dynamically
> grows as more space is required. Moreover, it uses a real filesystem,
> which is not the case of tmpfs afaik, so it might be faster.
> anyway, i know that size grows, but i've seen nothing in docs about
> freeing memory which is no more used...

Ramdisk would be an even worse way to implement it. It would suck more
memory and would require formatting to use a real filesystem.

I still fail to see how on a modern filesystem, fragmentation becomes
an issue. There hasn't been any benchmarks or convincing arguments
to that effect. Given the number of times that I've run similar
projects on my system and the insignificant amount of fragmentation,
I'd tend to say that it's not a worry at all.

I did notice that the reports of fragmentation were on small partitions
(e.g. boot). Higher fragmentation is simply to be expected on a
smaller partition and having the tarball around is going to
significantly affect it as is.

But, whatever. What seems obvious to my experience and analysis and
has been shown by benchmarks to be true is apparently against some
sort of underground religion here.

I don't mean to start that argument again though. It's clear that
nothing will be gained by it.

OTOH, if people want the proven-to-be-slower tmpfs in Sorcery as
an option, then it only makes sense to include the
probably-equally-as-slow ramdisk as well. You certainly have a good
logical basis to argue it, if you so wish.

-Phil/CERisE





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