Best kind of hard drive for heavy use?

[RW]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 17:54:49 +0200
Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Sep 2016 12:03:49 +0100, RW via freebsd-questions wrote:
> >I do almost everything like that on tmpfs.  
> 
> That was my suggestion, too. However, it has got one pitfall, the size
> of tmpfs. At least on Linux a swap doesn't help, if tmpfs should run
> out of space.

Swap helps in avoiding occasional problems. When I first started using
tmpfs I had 1.5 GB of RAM and 4GB of swap and set a limit 4GB (the
maximum for i386). 

I currently have 16GB of RAM and a tmpfs limit of 25GB

I don't need that much, I never even come close to running out of
memory for port building. I just means that I don't have worry about
it. 


>  Anyway, I nearly compile everything in tmpfs with just
> 1.9 GiB, just sometimes I enlarge it to 3 GiB or directly use the hard
> disk. A kernel not necessarily fails, but could fail to build with
> just 1.9 GiB, something like Firefox fails with 1.9 GiB, but at the
> moment I can't remember that 3 GiB ever was too small. I've got 4 GiB
> or RAM, but a little bit less is available, so a modern machine with
> much more than 4 GiB RAM should allow to chose a huge enough tmpfs.

IIRC with 4 GiB RAM you can have up to 16 GiB of swap, so you could
support up to about 19 GiB of tmpfs if you want.