Subject: Re: [vserver] Sponsoring VServer getting up to date with mainline
From: Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:07:55 +0100

Herbert Poetzl wrote:
>
> for repeated builds, the kernel does a good job 
> with caching, so that happens basically out of
> RAM, and so does the repeated diff between versions
>   


I guess you already know about ccache... Silly question really...

Your question is intriguing on a wider discussion basis though.  There 
are quite a few cases where a "mostly ram, but spilling to disk" storage 
solution would be desirable.  My temp dir for Amavis is one example - 
would be nice to keep that mostly in ram, but paging to disk is 
acceptable.  Not every filesystem needs to be reliable in the event of a 
disk crash / OS crash.

I'm kind of intrigued that your system hits disk for reads at all.  How 
much ram do you have at present?  I thought with hard linked trees you 
would be keeping the actual cached pages very much smaller?  I assume 
that the intermediate files are pushing out of disk cache?  Sounds like 
quite an intriguing problem to solve in it's own right..

Ed W