4 Filesystem Tuning

Filesystem performance can play a dramatic role in the performance of the SkunkWeb server. If filesystem performance is slow, cache operations will be slow also.

On Linux, the default filesystem settings seem to be just fine for the ext2 filesystem, but on other operating systems, the situation is a bit different.

If you are using a UFS filesystem (which is typical on BSD and Solaris), you want to set the async and noatime options or cache write operations will be really slow (70ms vs .01ms). At first, some may be uneasy about setting the async flag on a filesystem being wary of system crashes and filesystem corruption, but worry not. Because this is a cache, running mkfs at boot time on the cache filesystem should be an entirely satisfactory solution. Given the system will be a little sluggish at first, but as the cache fills up, speed will improve. Alternatively, if you are on Solaris (at least), you can turn on the logging option and that helps (cache writes go to about 20ms), but not quite as good as full async mode.

Another option is to allocate a whole lot of swap and put the cache in a tempfs filesystem.