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Create a temporary writable ram disk?

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Trying to diagnose my terrible write speeds at the moment.

 

I'd like to make a 2/3GB ram disk so I can test raw read/write speeds to it via the network, the differences between Big Packets and AFP/SMB.

 

I've tried the normal (googled) methods with no success so can someone point me in the right direction?

 

Cheers!

Enter the following on the server:

mkdir /tmp/test
ln -s /tmp/test /mnt/disk1/test
chown nobody:users /tmp/test
chown nobody:users  /mnt/disk1/test

 

Connect to the disk1 share as a guest. Reading and writing the the test directory will go to the RAM disk. Don't write too much or RAM will fill and the system will crash.

  • Author

Thanks,

 

Unfortunately OS X thinks it is an alias, not a folder that I can write to.

 

Is there a way of making /tmp/test a mountable disk like I can with boot, disk1, etc?

 

Otherwise I can't think of a way of benchmarking this!

That's odd. It shows up as a regular directory in my Finder. Using SMB it works with AFP it does not work.

  • Author

That's odd. It shows up as a regular directory in my Finder. Using SMB it works with AFP it does not work.

 

I'll give it another bash.

 

Is there anyway of making a mountable disk?

That's odd. It shows up as a regular directory in my Finder. Using SMB it works with AFP it does not work.

 

I'll give it another bash.

 

Is there anyway of making a mountable disk?

Yes, several

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/11/overview-of-ramfs-and-tmpfs-on-linux/

 

mkdir /tmp/concorde

mount tmpfs /tmp/concorde -t tmpfs

chown nobody:users /tmp/concorde

chmod 777 /tmp/concorde

 

You can make the mount-point anywhere you like, even possibly under an existing shared drive so you can easily get to it.  Or, if you add a few lines to the /boot/config/smb-extra.conf file:

 

[concorde]

path = /tmp/concorde

 

and then type

smbcontrol smbd reload-config

 

You can then see a new share pointing to your new in-ram temp filesystem.  The "mount" command knows how to create the temp file file system, and it automatically will expand to use as much memory as needed but not grow over 1/2 the size of the available RAM.  (it will not run you out of RAM, but should be usable for your tests, using only the memory needed for the transferred files)

  • Author

That's odd. It shows up as a regular directory in my Finder. Using SMB it works with AFP it does not work.

 

I'll give it another bash.

 

Is there anyway of making a mountable disk?

Yes, several

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/11/overview-of-ramfs-and-tmpfs-on-linux/

 

mkdir /tmp/concorde

mount tmpfs /tmp/concorde -t tmpfs

chown nobody:users /tmp/concorde

chmod 777 /tmp/concorde

 

You can make the mount-point anywhere you like, even possibly under an existing shared drive so you can easily get to it.  Or, if you add a few lines to the /boot/config/smb-extra.conf file:

 

[concorde]

path = /tmp/concorde

 

and then type

smbcontrol smbd reload-config

 

You can then see a new share pointing to your new in-ram temp filesystem.  The "mount" command knows how to create the temp file file system, and it automatically will expand to use as much memory as needed but not grow over 1/2 the size of the available RAM.  (it will not run you out of RAM, but should be usable for your tests, using only the memory needed for the transferred files)

 

Getting there now!

 

Two things:

 

1. How do I get AFP to see this mount point?

2. OS X won't let me write to it when I'm logged in as me, and says it can't be found when I connect as guest!! :(

Use SMB for testing. Configure the workgroup on the Mac control panel under Network->Advanced->WINS

  • Author

Use SMB for testing. Configure the workgroup on the Mac control panel under Network->Advanced->WINS

 

Well SMB maxes out at 60MB/sec where-as SCP maxes out at 85MB/sec.

 

Neither which hit the 120MB/sec I know gigabit ethernet can do. :/

  • Author

I only got 60 as well. Not sure why.

 

Glad it isn't just me!

 

I know AFP can go faster, but without a ram disk that AFP can see I can't test that :(

I only got 60 as well. Not sure why.

 

Glad it isn't just me!

 

I know AFP can go faster, but without a ram disk that AFP can see I can't test that :(

You probably just need to set the permissions so it can be seen.

 

(I don't have a MAC, nor ever really used one for more than a minute or two, so can't help you there)

Joe L.

I got it working with AFP and the speeds are great. 99Mbps write and 93Mbps read.

 

echo '"/tmp/test" "RAMdisk"   dperm:0770 fperm:0660' >> /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

 

 

The share should appear in the finder. Mount the share with the Finder. Open a terminal and enter

cd /Volumes/RAMdisk

Write test:

 time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024k of=tstfile count=1024

 

Read test:

dd if=tstfile bs=1024k of=/dev/null count=1024

 

Take the result and google "98105650  bytes/sec in megabytes/s"

  • Author

Sweet!

 

I'll test that when I get back to my Mac Pro!!

  • Author

Quick Q:

 

I think I'm getting OS X caching here:

 

File Creation: dd if=/dev/zero bs=128mb of=filename count=1 2>/dev/null

File Read: dd if=filename bs=128mb of=/dev/null count=1 #2>/dev/null

 

I get:

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

134217728 bytes transferred in 0.095465 secs (1405937313 bytes/sec)

 

Read: 1145.52 MB/sec

 

That is... quite fast!!

The size needs to exceed the amount of buffer space the system has. Remember anything *NiX based will use memory for buffering to make disk activity look faster than it really is.

 

For instance on my system writing to a laptop 5400rpm cache drive yields these results. Also note that even when using larger block sizes there is a max amount of bytes it will write for a count of 1 (look at the 4GB and 6GB numbers to see 2.1GB).

 

dd if=/dev/zero bs=128MB of=filename count=1

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

128000000 bytes (128 MB) copied, 0.174808 s, 732 MB/s

 

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1GB of=filename count=1

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

1000000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 1.26024 s, 794 MB/s

 

dd if=/dev/zero bs=2GB of=filename count=1

1+0 records in

1+0 records out

2000000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 2.30195 s, 869 MB/s

 

dd if=/dev/zero bs=4GB of=filename count=1

0+1 records in

0+1 records out

2147479552 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 2.52188 s, 852 MB/s

 

dd if=/dev/zero bs=6GB of=filename count=1

0+1 records in

0+1 records out

2147479552 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 2.73846 s, 784 MB/s

 

I get 86MB/s

 

dga:~ dga$ cd /Volumes/RAMd/

dga:RAMd dga$ ls -lhS ~/Downloads/ | more

total 50437992

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  3.9G Jul  9  2011 CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  2.9G Sep  7  2010 xcode_3.2.4_and_ios_sdk_4.1.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  1.8G May 13  2012 M4_Tank_2012.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  1.7G Jul 13  2011 CM_Battle_for_Normandy.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  1.1G Jul  9  2011 CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD2.iso

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  1.0G Oct  4 09:38 EPSONPrinterDrivers2.12.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  685M Apr 27  2011 ubuntu-11.04-desktop-i386.iso

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  468M Apr  4  2011 AmericanCivilWar.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  366M Dec  3 12:33 syslog-1.1

-rw-r--r--  1 dga  staff  362M Mar 29  2012 systemrescuecd-x86-2.5.1.iso

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  352M Feb 15  2011 The_Stroke_of_Midnight.dmg

-rwxr-xr-x  1 dga  staff  349M Apr 27  2012 syslog-2012-04-27.txt

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  338M Mar 21  2010 MUPromoSpring2010.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  262M Aug 31  2011 ParallelsDesktop-7.0.14920.689535.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  237M Apr 23  2008 BCUpdateVista64.exe

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  225M Mar 17  2008 Toast 9 Titanium Upgrade.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  218M Mar  5  2010 ParallelsDesktop-parallels-en_US-5.0.9344.558741.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  211M Jul  3  2011 ParallelsDesktop-parallels-en_US-6.0.12092.670880.dmg

-rw-r--r--@  1 dga  staff  210M Jun 20  2011 ParallelsDesktop-parallels-en_US-6.0.12090.660720.dmg

dga:RAMd dga$ time cp ~/Downloads/EPSONPrinterDrivers2.12.dmg .

 

real 0m11.595s

user 0m0.004s

sys 0m2.807s

dga:RAMd dga$

  • Author

Managed the following peaks:

 

 

SMB

Read: 60.8 MB/sec

Write: 54.6 MB/sec

 

AFP

Read: 103.1 MB/sec

Write: 110 MB/sec

 

Pretty speedy...

 

Archived

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