[bf1942] ramdisk

James Gurney james at globalmegacorp.org
Fri Jun 10 13:14:15 EDT 2005


I've thought about this in the past, but I'm not entirely convinced it 
would make much difference. Linux automatically caches the filesystem 
for files which are regularly accessed. For example, see the memory 
graph on my server:

http://fez.cracksmokingmonkeys.net/stats/graph_27.html

Right now, there's about 1GB of the filesystem cached in memory.

Also there's not much disk io during game play, so the only time it 
would make a difference is during map loading.. but if it's already 
cached in ram, the difference would (probably) be negligible.

Still, it would be an interesting experiment. If I have time I'll try it 
on our server and see if it makes any difference. The entire bf1942 
folder for our DC server is less than 500MB, so it would easily work 
with our 2GB of ram, I think..

James

On 6/10/2005 10:02 AM, Aubrey King wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 




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