> Of course, it will take and equally long time to load this ramdisk
> with the database. Seems like you could accomplish the same thing

Well, upon system start-up, I plan to:

1. create the ramdisk
2. copy the specific (large) MySQL files to the ramdisk
3. create needed symlink's
4. let it rip...

To deal with writing out changes back to disk, I will accomplishes
this with another MySQL server running in slave mode.

I don't suspect this will take all that long. Even if it takes 10
minutes, that's acceptable considering the speed gains I will get by
nothing have to wait for disk seeks, etc... later on.

> by putting it in disk cache, i.e., "cat huge_file* >/dev/null". This would
> cause the file(s) to be read, and with enough memory, would stay in cache.
> Then a subsequent search will be searching the cache copy, not reading
> disk.

Linux will let the cache grow to ~ 8GB? That's about how big the
database with the the index is. 8GB will be larger than 50% of
physical RAM (12GB).

What will happen to the cache when parts of the database are written
to? Is it write-back? Forgive my ignorance, I know nothing about how
Linux's cache mechanism works.

Thanks for the info.

Hello, I have the exact same problem.. did u manage to get it done?