ramdisk

[Aubrey King]

Hey.. this is an out-there question, but..

A couple of the engineers I work with and I were chatting about game 
servers and speed.  One of the guys I talked to mentioned that he thought 
that, in theory, a game server would SCREAM running in ramdisk.

Now.. I have no idea how to do anything w/ ramdisk in windoze, but it 
would seem that mounting a ramdisk partition would be trivial on linux.

Has anyone tried this yet?  All it'd take is making sure you have about a 
gig more ram than your maximum ram spikes and the server would run better 
than it ever could on the fastest hard drive available.

Of course, rebooting would wipe your server, but if you kept the configs 
backed up on a hard disk, it'd be easy as hell to write an init script to 
copy the configs in and start the server (in screen, of course).  And, of 
course, with Linux, you shouldn't have to reboot, aside from hardware 
issues and kernel upgrades, anyways.

Of course, if anyone has the bandwidth out there and an empty gentoo 
machine with like 4 gigs of ram, I'd be more than happy to try it for you. 
I'd do it myself, but I have a measly 1.5 up and no great machine to run 
it on. :)

Aubrey King
Systems Administrator II
IP Systems Engineering
Global Crossing, Ltd.