Re: Summary: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless
2012/6/10 Uoti Urpala wrote:
>> Yes, I know it was a biased summary. So as yours. But there's a difference
>> between mine and yours. Mine is based on some real-world applications,
>
> You've posted blatantly false claims. If you post claims like "1+1
> equals 2 because the moon is made of cheese", then you're a moron, even
> if 1+1 does equal 2.
(I like this example :)) It could be, it's impossible to know everything
in the world, I can be wrong. What false claim are you talking about?
>> Do you dismiss the theory (confirmed by Uoti Urpala test script) that
>> tmpfs+swap INCREASE number of writes and are hence bad for SSD?
>
> I think what the script shows is that there can be significant problems
> using tmpfs to hold large amounts of data, even if you have a lots of
> swap so that running out is not an issue. It doesn't show that the
> number of writes would increase on average.
>
> In general you seem to be quite clueless about the actual behavior of
> cache/swap, but you've still continued to make various claims about it.
I was referencing your words:
2012/5/25 Uoti Urpala wrote:
> Thus, if you do multiple read iterations through a large set of data
> (which does not fit in memory) on tmpfs, each iteration does disk
> read AND write rather than just read.
2012/6/1 Uoti Urpala wrote:
> I haven't read the relevant kernel code, but that doesn't match the
> behavior I see. Reading a large file from tmpfs and then allocating
> memory results in large swap writes every time, even if the newly
> allocated memory is not itself immediately swapped out and the file
> should already be in swap from before.
Reading from swap generates additional writes. It mean that tmpfs+swap
may actually increase amount of writes instead of reducing it, isn't it?
If you don't want me to reference your words, well, let's recheck that
guess again. Pressing "Enter" on .tar.bz2 archive in mc will untar it
to /tmp, burning a CD may generate iso-image in /tmp, let's check how
many write there would be in case of tmpfs?
Startup conditions:
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1017588 850224 167364 0 63332 480588
-/+ buffers/cache: 306304 711284
Swap: 2249092 40764 2208328
That is 1GB RAM, 2GB swap, 300MB RAM in use (which is barely enough for
almost empty gnome session), 700MB free. Swap is on /dev/sda3:
# cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used
Priority
/dev/sda3 partition 2249092 40764 -1
and is almost unused. Initial `iostat -k /dev/sda3` output:
Device: tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_read kB_wrtn
sda3 9,70 69,46 80,04 122660 141340
So there were 140MB written yet. Now let's put a 1GB file on tmpfs:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24,9147 s, 43,1 MB/s
How many writes were done to swap?
Device: tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_read kB_wrtn
sda3 12,29 86,29 479,66 162996 906020
Hm, 750MB more... I have actually expected it to be about 300-400 MB, but
well, I must have missed something like paging cluster...
Anyway, it's still less than 1GB, so it looks like we saved 250MB of writes,
right? Wrong! Because now we'll READ it back, that's what real app would do.
# time cat /tmp/file > /dev/null
real 1m58.916s
user 0m0.139s
sys 0m17.287s
So what do we have with r/w stats now:
Device: tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_read kB_wrtn
sda3 60,86 567,86 885,15 1243676 1938604
WOW! Reading that tmpfs-file we've done 1GB of reads AND 1GB WRITES.
Instead of 1GB writes for real filesystem, we'd got 1.7GB for tmpfs+swap.
Conclusion: using tmpfs+swap for files that increase amount of free RAM
generate (at least 70%?) MORE WRITES than regular filesystem. And the
more reads you do the more writes it generates. (Imho, that deserves a
place in summary!)
Does anybody still think that tmpfs+swap is good for SSD? ;)
What part of my summary's wrong? The QA part? Those were just theories.
Theories can be wrong, that's why I always ask for tests and examples,
they can't be wrong. Theories are there just to explain results of the
tests. Any theory is useful only when applied to a real life. When the
theory does not match real life it replaced with another theory. That's
how the entire physics work. :) Which of my theories is wrong, BTW?
--
Serge
Reply to: