[ILUG] wierd performance problems...solved

[John P. Looney]

 Ah. It seems Linux is a little over-smart with RAM disks. The box I was
playing had /var as a compressed ramdisk. And, with apache dumping access
logs into /var/log/httpd and a little database living in /var also, it was
getting hammered. It must have been recompressing 32k chunks everytime
there was a log write, and everytime the database was read, it would have
to decompress it...because ramdisks aren't buffered (for obvious reasons).
D'oh.

 Anyway, turning off httpd logging & not having a compressed RAM disk
seems to have solved the problem. Anyone know enough about RAM disks to
confirm that they aren't buffered ?

Kate

-- 
When I say 'free', I mean 'free': free from bond, of chain or command:
to go where you will, even to Mordor, Saruman, if you desire. "
    -- Gandalf, paraphrasing the choice between Free and Non-free software