We're planning to upgrade the server's RAM (probably up to 4 or even 8GBs) and then create a RAM disk and run FL player database from there.
For the RAM disk we would use RamDisk Plus 9 (http://superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php) which costs something but they claim it's able to allocate >4GB RAM even on a 32bit version of Windows XP. It also automatically saves the RAM disc image during shut-down and reloads it during startup so you don't need to care about that. The RAM disk would be copied onto HDD every hour or so to minimize the losses in case of a BSoD - this fortunately doesn't happen a lot.
We would of course have to purchase UPS this time, as a power failure would delete the RAM disk data.
The flserver currently loads 10-15mins after a crash or maintenance restart and this is caused by huge amount of character files (there are over 15000 characters in the database). We also run some server tools and those need to refresh the character base from time to time. And finally there could be some HDD related server lags that could be reduced this way. I am speaking about player DB backups and such.
Estimation of costs:
- 49$ for the RamDisk Plus 9 license
- 77$ for the 4GB RAM (154$ for 8GB)
- 98$ for the UPS
If you have any idea or see some risks we don't know about please post here.
