Re: DB on a ramdisk (was Re: Temporary, In-memory Postgres DB?)

Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> On 11/07/07 09:58, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Or put it on a ramdisk filesystem.

> But doesn't that just add more overhead and reduce the amount of
> memory that the OS can cache things in?

It's very possibly not a win, but the kinds of people who ask this
question at all do not understand the concept of caching, so I'm
sure they'll be happier with a solution where the data demonstrably
never hits disk ;-)

A case where it could be a win is where you are thrashing the DB with
heavy update load.  Even if everything is cached there will be a pretty
serious amount of disk write traffic, which'd possibly interfere with
other system activity.

            regards, tom lane