Mark Martinec (Mark.Martinec+amavis) writes:
> > so :-) ), I'm more on the linux side. But what I think linux (and
> > probably FreeBSD too) would do in case of the temporary files
> > amavisd-new creates is that those files are never written out to
> > disk due to their short lifetime but instead kept in memory.
>
> Yes, this is the general idea. Similar can be achieved by
> turning off synchronous writes of fs metadata on traditional
> file systems.
You don't want to turn off synchronous metadata, at least not
directly :) You want metadata reordering, like BSD SoftUpdates
does, so that you avoid committing to disk data which will disappear
within the next update window. Making the FS / partition asynchronous
is a sure way of ending up in single user mode, running fsck manually
to recover at the next crash.
> Provided that a partition is dedicated to
> temporary and scratch files and nothing else, it would be
> safe to do so.
In that case, yes, but have a script newfs said partition on every
boot then, to avoid any unexpected inconsistencies.
> The same holds for RAM cache in cheap IDE
> disks, even without battery backing. Certainly this would
> be a no-no if other data is stored on such disk, but is
> perfect for scratch storage, and fast too, not sacrificing
> system memory.
Side note: 99% of all IDE disks have write cache turned on by default,
which can bite quite hard in case of power outage. This is because
most IDE disks don't support tagging (some do, SATA does quite
systematically, but OS support is required), so they compensate
by lying to the OS about when the data is written to disk.
> Dedicating it
> to a ram file system makes it dedicated to such use only
> and most of the time such partition would wastefully be
> mostly empty, except when some exotic mail explodes to large
> size during decoding.
vfs backed ramdisks (FreeBSD for example) only use memory when
files are allocated. Removed files free up the corresponding memory
backing. So you only use as much memory as is necessary.
Phil
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