Re: Any way to "passive commit" to RAM without syncing ?

[Hal Murray <hmurray%megapathdsl.net@localhost>]

swiftgriggs%gmail.com@localhost said:
> Let's say I've got a machine with a boatload of RAM and I have an
> application which wants extremely fast writes, but doesn't really care  that
> much about data integrity, and this case, nor do I. Having the system  come
> back in the same state after rebooting is "nice to have" in this  thought
> experiment. Soo, here is the question:
...
> In other words, operate out of a RAM disk until my human operator gives  the
> go-ahead to flush out the writes to disk or the RAM disk gets full. I  think
> Sprite did something like this back in the Jurassic Period. I also  remember
> CacheFS for Solaris doing something similar for NFS.

I had a setup for a while to keep working log files in RAM.  I have forgotten the details.

The general idea was that the working log files were in RAM, old ones were on disk.  A script would rsync things from RAM to disk and delete stuff more than a few days old.  It was called by cron, the script that stopped the server, or by hand.  At boot time, another script would preload the RAM from disk so appending kept going at the right place..  If the system crashed, you lost the stuff in RAM that hadn't been backed up yet.

Overall, it was simple enough so that I (far from a wizard) could set it up without a lot of effort.

You might be able to do something similar for any specific application.  Please let us know if you come up with a good solution.


-- 
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