[ale] Storing MySQL Database in memory

[Christopher Fowler]

I had this idea that since I've upgraded the memory on one of our
servers to 2.5GB that I could run the MySQL database from memory.  I'm
not sure if there is a performance gain but I'm trying to figure out how
I would do it and preserve the data on reboots.

One idea I had was to create a 128mb ramdisk and a 128mb fs image.  I
would then create a RAID1 array between those.  Since a RAID1 is a copy
of the filesystem on reboot I could simply copy the fs.img to a backup
and create a new array.  Once the array is created I could then format
it and copy the data into it.  I think the only problem I see here is
that writes will slow me down since the writes have to go back down to
the disk.  How about reads.  The majority of the time the system is
reading not writing.

Chris