Use of RAM Disk in production environment to speed up application performance

Question

My application is facing issues due to its chatty nature with database. Due to many I/O operations or database calls, it is taking time to complete a flow specialy Batch Jobs. Code optimization is going on and this process will take some time to show positive results.

• Can I install RAMdisk on production environment and install jdk and SQL server in the RAMDisk?
• Will this help with all the I/O operations?
• Can I get some perfomance boost at least in case of Batch Jobs?

Answer 1

As @BaileyS suggested, a good compromise is to use a durable SSD drive. If you have a lot of data, you could use the SSD only to store database indexes and keep the data on a regular drive.

I wouldn't recommend using a RAM disk, unless you back it up very often, or the data on it are unimportant.

Instead, I'd try to maximize file caching of your OS. If your files are cached in RAM then working with them is quite similar as if they were on a RAM disk. On Linux, you can lower kernel's vfs_cache_pressure which means that the kernel will try harder to keep cached files in RAM. And also set vm.swappiness to 100 so that the system will swap out unused memory pages more actively, keeping RAM available for caching. This can speed up things considerably. See Can I configure my Linux system for more aggressive file system caching?

Answer 2

Assuming the majority of time is spent in the database waiting for I/O, RAM disk will certainly help (but the durability is gone). But why not simply go for in-memory database like h2, maybe even in an embedded mode to cut down network latency?