Hi All,

Under FreeBSD I've got a ram file system setup, and I have all the 'xf'
sendmail directories hosted there.

This kind of seemed to make sense (it's a high volume server) - but the
ramdisk never seems to get used (no files on it, no blocks used
according to 'df')

I realise under FreeBSD, with 'softupdates' enabled, if the files are
very short lived - they may not even make it to the filesystem.

But on a busy server (with hundreds of open connections receiving and
delivering) is there any point to doing this? - Or shall I take the ram
back?

The machine does get bogged down with disk i/o (under heavy queuing) -
and already has multiple spindle sets used for the queues, and logs
going to a seperate controller / drive, so I thought it might , but
I'm not so sure now

I mean if sendmail is putting stuff in the xf directories - I'd rather
it didn't cause another i/o operation on a 'real' disk, that's already
busy handling the df/qf files.

-Jon

In article <1161351361.660870.308170@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups .com>
"JonB" <jfretby@googlemail.com> writes:
>
>Under FreeBSD I've got a ram file system setup, and I have all the 'xf'
>sendmail directories hosted there.
>
>This kind of seemed to make sense (it's a high volume server) - but the
>ramdisk never seems to get used (no files on it, no blocks used
>according to 'df')

Since 8.10.0 (see the RELEASE_NOTES), sendmail uses "memory-buffered
files" on *BSD (at least), which should have the effect that the xf
files will normally never be created in the file system. See also the
XscriptFileBufferSize option in doc/op/op.* (i.e. you *could* force
sendmail to use your RAM file system:-).

>I realise under FreeBSD, with 'softupdates' enabled, if the files are
>very short lived - they may not even make it to the filesystem.

Softupdates may prevent such files from making it to the "disk", but
they are in the file system and should still be seen by df/du etc - in
this case the files aren't even in the file system.

>But on a busy server (with hundreds of open connections receiving and
>delivering) is there any point to doing this? - Or shall I take the ram
>back?

Yes, it would be better used as virtual memory for the sendmail
processes and/or file system cache for the files that are actually
created.

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org