Re: a 15 GB file on tmpfs

Erik Mouw
2005-07-20T13:20:10Z

On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 02:16:36PM +0200, Bastiaan Naber wrote:
> I have a 15 GB file which I want to place in memory via tmpfs. I want to do
> this because I need to have this data accessible with a very low seek time.

That should be no problem on a 64 bit architecture.

> I want to know if this is possible before spending 10,000 euros on a machine
> that has 16 GB of memory.

If you want to spend that amount of money on memory anyway, the extra
cost for an AMD64 machine isn't that large.

> The machine we plan to buy is a HP Proliant Xeon machine and I want to run a
> 32 bit linux kernel on it (the xeon we want doesn't have the 64-bit stuff
> yet)

AFAIK you can't use a 15 GB tmpfs on i386 because large memory support
is basically a hack to support multiple 4GB memory spaces (some VM guru
correct me if I'm wrong). Just get an Athlon64 machine and run a 64 bit
kernel on it. If compatibility is a problem, you can still run a 32 bit
i386 userland on an x86_64 kernel.

Erik

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