file vs malloc performance

[AD]

Hey,

 I was reading some tuning guides and came across Krystian's blog post
http://kly.no/posts/2010_01_26__Varnish_best_practices__.html which notes
the following:

On Linux, -sfile performs far better than -smalloc once you start hitting
disk

Assuming we have a dataset that we know is going to be larger than RAM, can
I confirm, even with non-SSD's that Varnish is more performant with -sfile
over -smalloc b/c swap is going to be slower than mmap() against a file ?
 What happens if the dataset is larger than the file ?

We are looking to host multiple sites through our varnish cluster which is
certainly not going to all fit into RAM so we want to choose the right
option here and we dont have an SSD option.

Thanks
_AD
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://www.varnish-cache.org/lists/pipermail/varnish-misc/attachments/20130426/3fa7a35d/attachment.html>