In one of the answers on SO (I forgot which one) I've seen a suggestion to make a RAID-1 array composed of a RAM disk and a physical partition. By adding the physical partition with --write-mostly
and enabling --write-behind
the system should read everything instantly from the RAM disk but still save all data to the physical partition so that the data are preserved and the RAID array can be assembled again after reboot.
Is such a setup reasonable? By reasonable I mean if it will perform any better in some scenario than using a SSD disk or than having just the physical partition and perhaps tweaking the kernel to favor disk cache (swappiness
and vfs_cache_pressure
)?