Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
linux-mag.com
Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#2For several months I have a 500MB tmpfs ramdisk (which I will probably turn into a ramfs one after reading that article).
I put my browser cache, several logging files and other volatile things there. Whenever I download something just to dispose it later, it goes in there. If I try something stupid with a lot files or some big ones, it goes in there.
It feels much nicer than to fragment the harddisk for such things; maybe it is just a placebo but it makes me happy. And of course access and usage of those files is blazing fast.
PS: Having Opera's temporary download directory automatically wiped away alone is worth it... :)
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#3On Acard's page that CD-ROM sized module supporting up to 64GB without memory included costs $550. The memory for it would cost about $900 more. Maybe Joel could get this for all employees after they get tired of their new X25s.
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#4Does anybody here use ramback? If so, please report your experiences.
Also, what other RAM-to-HD backup mechanisms are out there?
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#5For several months I have a 500MB tmpfs ramdisk (which I will probably turn into a ramfs one after reading that article). I put my browser cache, several logging files and other volatile things there. Whenever I download something just to dispose it later, it goes in there. If I try something stupid with a lot files or some big ones, it goes in there. It feels much nicer than to fragment the harddisk for such things;…
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Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#6Can I ask a question?
Does anyone know how to signal to the Operating System NOT TO CACHE these filesystems? This would be ram caching a ram cache which wouldn't make performance sense.
I cannot work out if that is part of the tmpfs/ramdisk driver itself, or if people who write these sort of articles don't know about normal read/write caching that occurs in all operating systems.
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#7A thing you can do with these is use an "at boot time, prime the ramfs" technique on file/web servers to pin important static files in memory if your normal serving patterns will push certain things in and out of the page cache more than you like.
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#8Can I ask a question? Does anyone know how to signal to the Operating System NOT TO CACHE these filesystems? This would be ram caching a ram cache which wouldn't make performance sense. I cannot work out if that is part of the tmpfs/ramdisk driver itself, or if people who write these sort of articles don't know about normal read/write caching that occurs in all operating systems.
Both ramfs and tmpfs on Linux cause writes directly to the page cache, just like a normal write but without a backing store (though in tmpfs' case, the backing store is swap). So there is no double RAM usage.
This is confirmed in these docs:
Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt
Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#9This article exemplifies one problem with the Linux/tech crowd. All that text and command line output - and not a single damn graph on the page! One graph showing speed differences would eliminate the need for tons of text on that page.
Re: Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace
#10On Acard's page that CD-ROM sized module supporting up to 64GB without memory included costs $550. The memory for it would cost about $900 more. Maybe Joel could get this for all employees after they get tired of their new X25s.
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