Ram-Disk ... Worlds only or complete Minecraft

Discussion in 'Bukkit Help' started by Silvo, Feb 20, 2011.

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  1. Offline

    Silvo

    Does it make any difference placing the entire minecraft folder into an ram disk or just a world folder. And if puting world folders makes it better for minecraft and the server, how can I tell my minecraft to save/modify my world thats in the virtual drive?
     
  2. Offline

    zajacmp3

    I tried to modify the location of world and hold world on a ram disc and other files on a normal disc. But I failed.
    I will even tell you that this is imposible ;)
     
  3. Offline

    mughi

    what os
     
  4. Offline

    Xon

    It's very much possible in both Windows and Linux.

    Under Windows; either use junction from Sysinternals, or mklink /d <dest> <target> which ships with Vista onwards. For Linux "ln -s" can make symlinks
     
  5. Offline

    Silvo

    aah, junction . I had this but somewhat missuderstood its purpose and used it wrong. So does it have an inpact on perfromance when puttin only wolrds into ram?
     
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    mjc506

    If the world's in a ramdisk, you'll get much quicker chunk loading (approx 10-50x quicker than from disk, depending upon hardware). You'll likely only notice it upon logon/warp or exploring (generating chunks is also quicker), or when the servers heavily loaded.

    However, if the physical server goes down for any reason (reboot, power failure etc) the ramdisk will be wiped out. On my linux box, I've got a script that creates the /world ramdisk, populates it, starts the server, and periodicly (every 5mins at the moment) syncs the /world with an on-disk cache. This gives me a good backup in case of a problem, and the place from which to populate /world on startup.
     
  7. Offline

    Silvo

    the autobackup is a good thing. Just is it now any diffrent to place your entitre minecraft folder into ram or just the world maps where the chunk generation takes place
     
  8. Offline

    croxis

    Supposedly the upcoming patch will see significant speeds in file reading on windows. I am not sure what gains there will be in linux. I personally have my world in a tmpfs and then setup a cron job to backup the world using svn every 6 hours.

    I found it to be very helpful on my vps where I share disk io time with other servers.

    The other case where you might see performance increase for heavy loads is if plugins on your server frequently read/writes to sqlite files.
     
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    Sixpak

    Started playing with MineOS last night and set it up using a ramdisk. It was a huge performance increase and my users are very happy. I don't have any #s, all I can say is that it's fast!
     
  10. Offline

    Phaedrus

    Considering the small size of files you could easily fit the entire server directory including the world dir into a 256meg ramdisk, so you might as well. There are a lot of files for plugin loading and their config files etc, so it makes sense to have it all on the ramdisk since it can only improve their performance.

    But for the love of all that is blocky, BACKUP THE ENTIRE RAMDISK FREQUENTLY or be willing to lose everything at the drop of a hat. Repeat that outloud 10 times over. Then go out and buy a UPS.

    I'm using the free version of dataram ramdisk on windows and it has a few options of syncing chnages back to disk, either on a schedule, or continuously in the background. I do it on a schedule (every 5 minutes is the minimum) and then backup the synced back world directory on a seperate schedule every 15 minutes onto a seperate hard drive entirely.

    The whole thing gets launched from a single batch file that runs on system startup, so if the system ever does reboot for whatever reason it will relaunch the server when it comes back up.
     
  11. Offline

    Sixpak

    [​IMG]

    ...and my ramdisk get a backup every 15 minutes.
     
  12. Offline

    dark navi

    Anyone wanna write up a quick tutorial using Dataram RAMdisk to host/back up a directory?
     
  13. Offline

    Phaedrus

    I'm working on a windows server tutorial much like TNTs linux tutorial, but I won't be able to finish it for another day or two. Not that it matters since most plugins aren't working with the newest builds and there is an official minecraft update right around the corner... I may wait until after the dust settles.
     
  14. Offline

    Silvo

    Thank you for all our comments. Those were very helpfull. About the backups. I'll do it with a batch file on my windows too, its juts that whenever I'll do it, and my players play after it, the world is saved but their player position and inventory remains the same as the last save prior the backup via batch file.

    my bacth file.
    Code:
    del D:\minecraft\*.* /F
    xcopy M:\minecraft\*.* D:\minecraft /E/H/R/K/Y
    pause
    the idea is simple.. delete all the files on my harddrive, then copy all the files on my virtual drive to the harddrive.
     
  15. Offline

    TnT

    That batch file does almost exactly what I do in my Ubuntu tutorial. I use a ramdisk for just the world data, nothing else, but if I had the room, I'd put my entire MC directory in a ramdisk. That way, if you have plugins for multiworld, any new worlds would also be included in your ramdisk (instead of having to manually create a ramdisk for each world). Putting just the worlds in ramdisk would be good enough, imo.
     
  16. Offline

    Slugslug

    am not convinced am seeing a major improvement (if any?)!!

    I have scripts rsync'ing back and to and the world on /dev/shm

    using compass to move around am still seeing the world load (and not that fast) am comparing this to my 4disk RAID0

    the ram is DDR2 1066

    I host the server and play on localhost
     
  17. Offline

    vapid2323

    Well you are playing on localhost so its going to be very fast most all the time.
     
  18. Offline

    TnT

    @Slugslug - you have a 4 disk stripe going on, what immense amount of I/O throughput were you expecting?
     
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