Ram drive with atomic write-to-disk

[GurrenLegume]

Hi. I'm only somewhat new to linux but I still don't have a real grasp of it's deep innards and I had a fairly outlandish idea that I'm wondering whether is possible/plausible or not.

I want to run a game server on CentOS that has a very high dependency on fast writes-to-disk. Disk writes are pretty much the single bottleneck in this server.

First I looked at allowing a high queue of writes to pile up before it flushes them to the disk, but I read that this causes fsync, which is still used commonly, to take a very long time.

I've been thinking about the possibility of running the server on a RAM disk, but I still want changes to be saved to non-volatile storage. Not all at once, but have it actively write the changes to disk. The hope is that this would smooth out the peaks and valleys of write activity and improve overall performance, but I have not seen this idea discussed anywhere.

So my question is, is there any plausible way to continuously copy writes to a RAM disk to a physical drive without slowing down the speed of the writes to the RAM drive below the speed of said RAM? Or is there a better way to obtain this sort of performance, short of investing in expensive equipment?

Thanks

[Rubberman]

You could run rsync to do this, which can be set up to run at some reasonable interval. You can also set its niceness (priority) to run at a lower priority than other stuff, such as your game server, so it doesn't impact it quite so much.