I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.
SoftRAM 95 (1996)
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Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#12I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack.
At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#13I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack. At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
You mean "8MB". :D I was a poor high school kid so that would have killed my lunch budget for at least a month.
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#14I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack. At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
[deleted]
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#15>While this seems an easy relationship to satisfy, more-complex models based on real-world performance parameters and access patterns indicate that it is, in reality, very difficult to obtain a performance boost with this method. Now that improvements in CPU speed have outpaced improvements in storage speed, it's easier to benefit from compressed swap in ram. Linux includes "zswap"[0], which in my experience works we…
Storage speed has really outpaced CPU speed for the decade zswap has been out. It still has its place but if you have modern flash storage it may well be a throughput drop and power usage increase to enable zswap (particularly with the default algorithms).
Latency for pulling single pages has never really been limited by CPU performance, that's always been faster and will probably never change due to physics.
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#16I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.
We could have a government agency to fund it, since it’s in the public interest!
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#17I went half in on "RAM Doubler" with a friend. He had their other products that were an uninstalled and some other goofy utilities. It didn't do jack. At the time (1996?) RAM was cheap enough to just buy another 8MB instead of some software
RAM Doubler for the Mac wasn’t a scam. Because of the piss poor way that Classic MacOS handled memory where you had to manually tell it how much memory an application could use and applications needed that much contiguous memory, you could easily find yourself with plenty of RAM but it being fragmented and unusable. Also, you needed to have as much disk space as you had RAM + any “virtual memory”.
RAM Doubler used the “System Memory” that could auto-expand and made applications think they had contiguous memory. I don’t know if the “compression” was a scam but the better memory management definitely wasn’t.
Also for PPC Macs, it was usually bundled with “Speed Doubler” - a much faster 68K emulator than what came with early PPC Macs. The operating system itself was also partially emulated, you did get real world speed improvements.
RAM definitely wasn’t cheap in 1994, I paid $500 for 16MB of extra RAM for my PPC 6100/60 for a total of 24MB (third party reseller). I remember in 1996 though buying a 32MB RAM stick for around $350 for the DX/2-66 DOS Compatibility Card in my 6100/60.
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#18I wish someone would do a study like this on e.g. cosmetics which claim to do miraculous things, but in reality rarely do anything at all. In fact I strongly suspect it all comes from the same giant vat of petroleum byproducts and the only difference is the fragrance, color, and emulsifiers.
If you just want to know the truth, not "prove" it "globally" in a "study", which essentially amounts to proving to the wolf that he is dangerous to the sheep, all you need to do is look at the ingredients list.
For extra credit, look the ingredients up and see how many of them have above-zero blue hazmat ratings.
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#19This entrepreneurial spirit lives on nowadays at https://www.downloadmoreram.com/
Re: SoftRAM 95 (1996)
#20>While this seems an easy relationship to satisfy, more-complex models based on real-world performance parameters and access patterns indicate that it is, in reality, very difficult to obtain a performance boost with this method. Now that improvements in CPU speed have outpaced improvements in storage speed, it's easier to benefit from compressed swap in ram. Linux includes "zswap"[0], which in my experience works we…
Storage speed has really outpaced CPU speed for the decade zswap has been out. It still has its place but if you have modern flash storage it may well be a throughput drop and power usage increase to enable zswap (particularly with the default algorithms). Latency for pulling single pages has never really been limited by CPU performance, that's always been faster and will probably never change due to physics.
As someone running older hardware with a spinning disk drive, the comment was useful and something I might consider looking into.
At work I think I have a 2012-era ssd drive, that while speedy is probably pretty far behind modern drives. When things start thrashing in swap it's a bad time all around.