what is the difference between tmpfs and ramdisk? if they differ which one is benificial in terms time required to access?

I have a file (size >500MB).which i want to put in the memory to reduce access time and avoid diskio. i tried using ramdisk which improved access time to some extend.
I just wanted to know whether tmpfs gives better performance than ramdisk.

Also if anyone have idea to do this in any other way in linux please help me out. ( I want to access this file from kernel module so i can not use mmap)

Thanks in advance

shreyas

TempFS is a memory based file holder which will only allow you to use half of whatever physical memory is available. If you have to store just short of 1GB of data, you'll need 2GB of physical ram available. It'll have instant access as it sits on memory. It's also dynamically changeable size wise.

Ramdisks however is a file with a file system inside of it loaded in to memory. It's difficult to dynamically change it's size and it's fast for reading but not writing to.

If you have to use one, TempFS is the way to go, or Sata 10k RPM raptor HDD would probably suffice

Thanks a lot for that information. just out of curiosity, i did not get exactly what "memory based file holder" is? can u suggest any link or doc to understand implementation difference?

Thanks,
Shreyas.

There is an explanation of tmpfs at
http://www.funtoo.org/en/articles/linux/ffg/3/

I am facing one problem while using tmpfs.

my program creates a file of around 3MB. and then i access it later multiple times.

now when i created file on normal (/ partition) partition it took around 1 minute to create that file.

then i thought of using tmpfs to speed up creation and access to this file.

So I created same file on tmpfs partition, it took 3 minutes ( 3 times more than normal partition). which is something i never expected.

also access time is more by couple of seconds.

now the confusion is when i use tmpfs my results must improve which is not happening.

I mounted tmpfs using following command

mount tmpfs /mnt/tmpfs -t tmpfs

Can somebody tell me what is going wrong?

Thanks in advance

Shreyas

Hi,

Would you clarify your statement for;

What is this based on?


As for the 10K hdd subsystem speed, it would not compare to a 'ramdisk' nor a 'ssd' subsystem. Sure a 10K would work faster than a 5400 or 7200 but they too would not compare to a 'ramdisk' or a 'ssd'.