[tlug] Making better use of SSDs?

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

Hi all,

My employer is thinking of purchasing a server and wants to also buy
an SSD along with it.  I can only think of two ways of making use of
an SSD under Linux and I was wondering if anyone has better ideas.

1)  Well, make it into a drive.  This would only benefit programs that
have a lot of I/O or programs like Unix's 'sort' which can allow you
to specify which temporary directory to use.  I can just specify the
SSD drive.

2)  Make it into a swap partition.  This would help if the amount of
memory used by a program exceeds main memory and it starts paging to
disk.  Paging to an SSD would surely be faster.  (Assuming it pages
often...)

The problem with #2 is that you don't see the benefit of the SSD until
your program thrashes.  And, of course, the SSD still isn't main
memory.  What's on the SSD will be swapped out static pages.

As an example, suppose the server has at most 32 GB and a 32 GB SSD is
purchased.  Option #2 is better than not having the SSD at all (of
course!) but also not the same as having a machine with 64 GB of main
memory.  :-)  Option #1 relies on running programs that have either a
lot of I/O or have a way of specifying alternate temporary
directories.

Can anyone think of a third option?

Thank you!

Ray