Fast and reliable /tmp partition.

[Uwe Doering]

Александр Деревянко wrote:
> Hello Freebsd Questions,
> 
> I'm using DVD-R to back up our Perforce SCM server.
> The size of backup data is 13Gb now and increase ~ 1Gb in two months.
> The full backups was made every week, incrementary - every day.
> 
> I have made a custom script to start archiver, split on the fly results 
> to adequate sized files (< 1Gb),
> evaluate checksum and burn it onto DVD.
> The script also verify burned DVD by using stored checksums, and burn 
> DVD again if needed.
> The problem is: i can't compose DVD's on the fly, i need to save them 
> somewhere.
> 
> I need to have a big, fast and reliable temporary filesystem.
> 
> It doesn't needed to survive reboots.
> It must be fast writing. (RAID5 vinum array which i have is slow 
> performs writes)
> And even if one of the disks in server computer will broke (i have a 
> vinum on them),
> the backup procedure must still works.
> 
> Does anybody have expirience with temporary fast filesystems ?

You could use striping and mirroring (RAID 0+1).  This is both fast with 
writes and fail-safe.  And if the partition doesn't have to be crash 
resilient you could mount a UFS/UFS2 filesystem asynchronously.  With 
hard disk drives that's about as fast as it gets, I'd guess.

Of course, a RAM disk would be even faster, but the data volume you're 
dealing with is way too high for normal system memory.  There are RAM 
disks on the market that you can add to the system as a physical 
(hardware) device, in the form of a hard disk drive or a PCI card, but 
these are usually pretty expensive.

    Uwe
-- 
Uwe Doering         |  EscapeBox - Managed On-Demand UNIX Servers
gemini at geminix.org  |  http://www.escapebox.net