Can Ramdisk improve server performance?

Can someone tell me?

 

I would think so, since the speed that RAM is read from/written to is several million times faster than reading from/writing to a disk. However, there are things to take into consideration: Do you have enough RAM? Is your Internet connection good enough for anyone to really notice a difference?

Plus, if your computer ever goes off, there goes your RAM disk, and whatever's in it, although most programs will save the disk to an actual hard disk first.

 

Yeah. A power failure will wipe the ramdisk completely. Backups would be advised, but those would be bottlenecked at the speed of the hard drive it's backing up to. But I've made a little workaround for that:

Have your backup plugin only ever store a single backup, set it to back up to the ramdisk. When the server backs up, it will duplicate whatever backup material you set it to. The duping will be fast, and so the server will be laggy for only a moment while backing up. Once backup is configured, write your own script that automatically moves the backup off of the RD into your backup folder. That way, your actual bukkit server isn't tied up when the backup is offloaded from the RD to the HDD.

The optimal option for a medium/small-sized server storage is a good-quality SSD, I've found. It isn't as risky as a RD but still preforms great.

 

The lag spikes produced by transferring data from ramdisk to HDD negates any positive effect it has IMO, much better to grab an SSD and be done with it.

Unless your HDD is straight out of 2002 I doubt you'll see any difference with a ramdisk or SSD until you hit ~50+ players anyway.

 

Using a RAM disk was great back when Minecraft had the old file storage system for maps, the one that generated a gazillion files. Now with the new file system, the impact of a RAM disk is way less impressive compared to a good hard drive or SSD.

 

Heck yes it improves performance, especially if you are doing lots of block changes at once. I moved to an SSD and when I do big worldedit changes, the server locks up now...........with the RAMdisk, it would blow right threw it with minimal lockup.

As far as "lag spikes produced by transferring data", that too can be negated. All you have to do is PERIODICALLY rsync data from the RAM to the hard drives..........say around every 15 minutes or so. If you even wanted to, you could limit the transfer rate of rysnc, to even further lighten the load that is put on the disks during syncing. See with rsync it only copies over the changes that occur to the world, so things that are unchanged will not be synced. My point is, that if setup properly, it will not cause "lag spikes" as Orcworm mentions, yet will destroy an SSD in both reads and writes and longevity. RAMdisks can read/write at around 3,000 MB/s, whilst a SSD can do usually only 500 MB/s...........not to mention that you will kill that SSD pretty fast with all those writes done to it.

Although, if you don't set it up properly and/or have a slow hard drive and have a big server/world, then yes it will cause lag spikes during rsyncing. These lag spikes will also cause the overall TPS of the server to drop or it will just flat out lag the whole server. Another thing is, that I would never attempt to use a RAMdisk on Windows.............on Linux yes.........Windows.........heck no.