Transient directory location

I'm trying to change the directory for tmp files created during deployment (.iwold and .iwnew).

Is there any issue to setting the transientDirectory to /tmp (which is a virtual memory)?
Would that be faster than using a directory in the same filesystem as the target file location?
Would it be faster than using a another directory on a different filesystem as the target file location?

The manual excerpt is below.. it doesn't go into enough detail though.
If the alternate temporary file location resides on the same file system as the target file
location, performance will be somewhat degraded.
If the alternate temporary file location resides on a different file system than the target
file location, performance will be further degraded.

Thanks for your help!
Dmitry

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Adam Stoller

I don't know - the documentation seems to indicate that there are issues with respect to performance and that using a different file system will provide worse performance than using the same file system.

My guess is that the performance issue has to do with the atomic (or lack thereof) renaming into place of the .iwnew files (or the .iwold on rollback)

The advantage of using the transient space is most likely the ability to spread out the "cost" of allocating extra disk space to the partition where the files will eventually reside - this is probably most useful with respect to transactional deployments where you need to provide for 3 times the amount of disk space for your biggest deployment.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Dmitry

Thanks for your insight. However I'm still not sure - Do you think it's ok to use virtual memory as this transient space?

jed

You talking about using /tmp on solaris which is often mapped to physical RAM? This can lead to application and server crashes if /tmp fills up and maxes out all of you "real" ram. If you only do small deployments, this would probably work, but it is a big risk. /tmp can fill up real quick.

--
Jed Michnowicz
jedm@sun.com
Content Management Engineering
Sun Microsystems

nipper

yea, what Jed said.

What type of deployments do you do ? Are they through WF or scheduled ? How large are they typically ?

If you do deployments via WF, and thus it is a groups of files, not hundreds of megs, then this is a reasonable approach.
If you do few very large deployments do not use ./tmp

Dmitry

Thanks guys. Mostly we do transactional filelist deployments via WF, but I don't want to create unnecessary risks with no real benefit, so we will probably avoid using /tmp.