Relative performance of swap-backed MFS vs. regular UFS?

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Clifton Royston <cliftonr at lava.net> writes:
>   For a large temporary file system which must hold short-lived files,
> mostly small but occasionally several very large ones (e.g. 100MB+), is
> it better for performance and stability if this file system:
>
>   1) resides on a swap-backed MFS and trusts the OS to swap out
> low-priority blocks if needed under RAM pressure, or
>
>   2) on a regular UFS and trusts the OS to buffer as many blocks as
> possible into RAM when RAM is free?

the former, provided you have enough RAM.  A swap-backed MFS will only
swap out when it has to, while a UFS will always write out changes
after a while.

>   I temporarily enlarged it to 256MB which is working, but as I worked
> out the worst case scenario, I realized it really would need to be
> nearly 1GB to handle multiple zip-bombs each hitting the 100MB size
> limit.  This makes me wonder if it's wise to specify a 1GB MFS on a
> system with only 1GB RAM, or wiser to just revert to a regular file
> system?

RAM is cheap.  Toss in a couple extra gig and set up a 2 GB MFS.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no