Running a Site on a Ram Disk

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You're friendly neighborhood automation routine.

RamDisks are great for boot cycles, but not much beyond that in my experience. I've found that using memcached does much more good than a ramdisk and it allocates memory in a much more friendly way - and you can network it to boot.

Now if you are talking about a windoze machine, that's a whole different ball game. The funny thing is that I've had apps slow down because the ram disk gets data put in a swap file just like anything else. Much better improvement on windows, but still not perfect.
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Several years ago, I tested RAM Disk shares over GigE connections and compared them with benchmarks from disk based shares.

RAM Disks have an advantage over single disk shares, but the difference between RAM and a hardware RAID is nominal at best - at least over a network share.
My URL: http://www.somacon.com/

After a little bit more research...

I discovered that the problem with MediaWiki on a RAMDisk actually was a problem with my php accelerator. I decided to have a little bit of fun by moving mysql tables onto a RAM disk as well as MediaWiki and vBulletin. Strangely, the load testing results were roughly the same using ab. I've come to the conclusion that RAM disks are not an effective optomization technique on a linux system, and that you are better served making that memory available to the kernel to do with what it chooses. The potential problems associated with corruption and losing data are not outweighed by the performance enhancement.
My URL: http://www.stevekallestad.com