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Old 29th March 2009
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gosha View Post
And, by the way, is it really worth doing this?
If you learned something from the exercise, then it had value, but as for seeing any performance increase as a result, I doubt it. Most of the recipes you may be finding on the Web for this trick target Soekris-like systems which measure in the ~500MHz range & have limited RAM. Moving /tmp to RAM is done more to save writes to (older) CF cards to extend their lifetime than to boost performance. Your PPC Mac mini is a 1.4GHz system which doesn't have the same constraints (solid-state storage).

If you have concerns about performance, study both the manpage to top(1) & it output. If the system is inordinately swapping, then moving /tmp to RAM might be called for, but I suspect the performance increase experienced will be negligible.

As an anecdote, when Hitachi 7200rpm laptop drives first came out, I immediately went out & put (an unauthorized) one in a IBM Thinkpad which originally had a factory-installed 5400rpm drive. The perceptible difference between drives when running OpenBSD were nearly negligible, & the 7200rpm drive ran warmer. Eventually, IBM added a whining beep (because the drive was unauthorized...) in a BIOS update which prompted me to just get a bigger drive from them, & for heat reasons, they were only selling 5400rpm drives. I've never regretted downgrading back to a slower drive. Given the algorithms OpenBSD employs with disk writes (& when to do them...), I didn't find such performance tricks very beneficial. At least, that has been my experience.
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