[OpenIndiana-discuss] improving ZFS latency with hard disks

[dave at loud-mouth.net]

Le me know if ZFS questions should be asked to another group.

Problem: A documentation application takes several minutes to open 
documents containing large numbers of links to images. Aparently, the 
application is making many separate file attribute queries, so the sum 
of all the separate disk rotation latencies are adding up.

The obvious solution is to move the zfs pool over to SSDs, but since the 
entire documentation collection is less than 10GB, I was wondering if 
there was a way to address the problem with RAM. As far as I can tell 
from the documentation, the ARC and L2ARC are based on recently used 
data, so it doesn't sound like accessing attributes from all of the 
linked files to a document would be helped by a larger ARC when the 
document is first opened.

Is there a way I can get more of the proximity files in the cache with 
any tuning parameters, or even utilize some sort of RAM disk for the 
files in the directory of concern?

Thanks,

Dave