Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!bostic From: bostic@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Keith Bostic) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: /dev/swap - possibility of it being a ramdisk Keywords: /dev/swap Message-ID: <22157@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 13 Dec 87 19:44:25 GMT References: <712@qetzal.UUCP> Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 28 In article <712@qetzal.UUCP>, rcw@qetzal.UUCP (Robert C. White) writes: > Watching my poor little unix boxes swap, it occurred to me: > why not utilize some extra ram to implement /dev/swap? The idea is to get all the memory you can and put the file systems that you use for small, temporary file creation in memory. Not /dev/swap, as enough memory means never having to say you're swapping. In article <10796@brl-adm.ARPA>, mike@BRL.ARPA (Mike Muuss) writes: > BRL gave a lot of business to the "BULK MOS" RF-11 emulator companies > back in the PDP-11 days. It was indeed true that the best choice > for a bulk memory system was /tmp. The second best choice was the > root itself. This (root as RAM being good) was really a problem with the V7 kernel. Since the V7 kernel immediately discarded all text segments and inodes (until Mike Karels added shared text segments to 2.9BSD, whereupon it discarded them after the last reference disappeared) it helped to put the program in a RAM disk. The real fix was to teach the kernel to do LRU cacheing on the text and inodes. Once that was done, we found that, on PDP's with 4MB of memory and student type loads, you can't get enough people on the machine to use all of memory and nothing ever swaps. Keith Bostic ARPA: bostic@okeeffe.berkeley.edu UUCP: ucbvax!bostic or seismo!keith