I'm currently setting up server hardware/software for a group who want to start a new server. What I want to do is this: Have my world file in the RAMDisk for faster access and therefore better performance, and the server itself on the main C drive. Is there a way to have the wordfile elsewhere besides in the server folder? And another question: There is a lot of controversy as to whether RAMDisks actually help. The server has 16GB total, and I'm allocating the server 4GB for the world (hopefully) and 5GB to the actual CraftBukkit. Is it even beneficial to have a RAMDisk? Or have I wasted my time? Also, any ideas on other things I can do to maximize performance are welcome. EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
How many players do you think you're going to have? One could argue that the space allocated for the RAMdisk would be better off used as general heap space for CraftBukkit.
If you are running a 1.2.5 server, yes, a ramdisk would be beneficial because their file handling procedures sucked. They cleaned up their file handling code so it is no longer needed/required. There simply is not enough benefit for a ramdisk to outweigh the risk of world corruption due to power outages and whatnot. Ramdisks require extra steps to start the server, write contents of ram to disk every # of minutes and shutdown steps to ensure it works properly. To minimize the risk of lost data to server crash or power outage, you increase the frequency of writes to disk but that also means you are losing that "performance" edge you were trying to achieve. I used to use ramdisk but have long since abandoned it when I discovered it was no longer necessary (thank God). If your hard drive really stinks in performance, consider getting an SSD which is almost as fast as ram when it comes to reading the contents and you don't ever have to worry about fragmentation. However, if you run a Linux server, you also don't have to worry about fragmentation there either. LHammonds
