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Gilbert,Yes... it's a great way to speed things up and save wear-and-tear on a disk if your queue is relatively small and you have enough memory. The primary disadvantage is if you reboot you lose everything in the queue, which is a problem for relay sites and a potential problem for the local system if the decoders are running behind in queue processing. I'm considering an alternative approach which is to use one of the new SSD (Solid State Disk) drives which has the advantage of being fast but also retains data on a reboot. I'm not sure how the pricing is yet, but I think it won't be long before SSD's are cheaper than adding main memory. My only hesitation is the number of write cycles you get out of the SSD's, which is important since and LDM queue is write intensive. I have to look into that a bit futher...
Art
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
Hello all,
I'm just curious as to how many people run their LDM queues from memory?
Using Fedora Core 7 or 8, the default kernel sets aside memory in a device
known as "/dev/shm". Do a "df -h" and you'll see it. Depending on the size
of your physical memory, the default kernel setting gives you about 25% of
the available memory to put files in as an extra "hard drive", if you
will. Compiling your own kernel, you can put in as little or as much as
you want. On my system, I have the following:
% df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
707523888 25768472 645235480 4% /
/dev/sda1 101086 18576 77291 20% /boot
tmpfs 1815312 1197764 617548 66% /dev/shm
To run the LDM queues out of memory, you need to put your ldm.pq and
pqsurf.pq files into /dev/shm, and remake them every time you reboot,
since /dev/shm is really just memory. The easiest way to
do this with LDM 6.6.X or 6.7.X.X is to go into your ldmadmin-pl.conf
file in your ~/etc directory with the changes I have in mine:
$bin_path = "$ldmhome/bin";
$etc_path = "$ldmhome/etc";
$log_path = "$ldmhome/logs";
$data_path = "$ldmhome/data";
#$pq_path = "$data_path/ldm.pq";
#$surf_path = "$data_path/pqsurf.pq";
$pq_path = "/dev/shm/ldm.pq";
$surf_path = "/dev/shm/pqsurf.pq";
Note the changes to $pq_path and $surf_path.
Now, when I go to /dev/shm, this is what I see:
% cd /dev/shm
% ls -al
total 1197764
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 80 2008-02-14 10:22 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4060 2008-02-14 11:31 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ldm users 1222955008 2008-02-14 10:22 ldm.pq
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ldm users 2347008 2008-02-14 10:22 pqsurf.pq
Since the LDM queues run in memory, you can make a 1.2 GB ldm.pq in just a
few seconds on a Core 2 processor. Much more importantly, if you have a
lot of feeds and/or are a relay site, this cuts down on your disk
read/writes by a TON. For instance, I am getting every Level 2 data site
minus Alaska and NOP (still trying to figure out what ldmd.conf request
line I need to get the latter test site), and my load average is around
.5. before this, it was around 3 on "light" days, but when there's a lot
of stuff happening around the country, it used to go up to 12! Now, it's
been cut by a factor of 6. That's HUGE, and it saves my hard drive, too.
My overall load average has dropped by 75% or so since I have done this.
And thanks to Dave Bukowski at the College of DuPage for suggesting this,
as well as Tom Yoksas from UNIDATA and Mike Dross from Wright-Weather.
It really works!
Thoughts?
*******************************************************************************
Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
*******************************************************************************
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