[bf1942] ramdisk

[Aubrey King]

Please let me know what you find.  If nothing else, the maps must still be 
cached, which means a negligible ammount of i/o.  If map load times were 
decreased, that'd make my gameplay much happier. :)

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

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, James Gurney wrote:

> 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.
>> 
>
>
>