Ramdisk on a low-budget VPS?

Development Feature Request
1

Ages ago with CRUX, I remember William made the argument that ramdisks were no longer worth doing considering the volatility, difficulty of setup, and decreasing price of SSDs.

Recently, I was playing around with an extra VPS that I have and trying to see if it could run a Minecraft server. From what I can tell, the bottleneck must be the disk I/O. The CPU was hovering around 1.8 (on a 4 core VPS) and it was still very laggy. (Can anyone recommend a good way to confirm that that is the bottleneck?)

I’m wondering if I could make my server load from a ramdisk, and if it would speed things up. Would I need to do anything special to avoid interfering with what MineOS does or could I open up fstab and add /var/games/minecraft/server/______ to a ramdisk in there?

2

Ever since Minecraft moved over to Anvil (and with the maaaany updates since then), trying to fit the world in ramdisk and the Java heap is really impractical. A low-budget VPS will probably scarcely make enough RAM for the game itself–or at least, it’s unlikely that loading/writing the world faster will be preferable to all the loading/unloading (or swapping) that will occur when playing.

If you do have disk I/O bottleneck, it’ll only occur while people are going out and generating new tiles–if they’re not, you might expect reduced performance when you’re actually just building in already-generated areas.

That said, the ramdisk page is still there in the wiki.