> If the machine has mare than enough physical RAM and tons of swap, is > there no way to configure MySQL to hold a 2Gb buffer in memory? I > really want to avoid building a custom kernel and it feels like I should > be able to get this working using login.conf, ulimit and sysctl > settings. Or is this a wall that is not meant to be broken through?
If I may asked, why would you really want to get a 2GB buffer??? I obviously do not know what your setup is or your application here, or how big your database actually is, but if you are trying to have everything in ram for speed for example and that your application do not make changes to the database, then you could always setup a partition in ram disk only and put your table there. You could mount /var/mysql/test in a ram disk that you configure to use 2GB or ram and that would do what you want. If you need to make changes to that database in RAM, then you could use replication to save the changes to the physical hard disk, witch would need to run to copy of MySQL obviously to replicate it live to a different table name. I did that before and it does actually works well, that's when I had slow hardware and I would around it that way, now I don't need that anymore, but still possible to do it, if that's really want you need. You can create your table to be loaded on the start and be put into ram disk, or may be even under volatile table as well, but not knowing what you want to do, these are just ideas that may or may not apply or may be even stupid as well to do depending of what you really try to solved as a problem. The ram disk I must say was a very cleaver idea and works very well back then, but needed raidframe, witch I didn't really like to use. I might do it again now with Marco softraide for fun and see if that would actually works or not, just as a test. Anyway, hope this may give you some thoughts or not as I am not really sure where you try to go here. But no matter what, you still limited to 4 GB for physical memory anyway. Best, Daniel
