
Ramdisks - Now We Are Talking Hyperspace - linuxmag
http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7388/1.html
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fno
For 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... :)

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pibefision
can this be done using osx?

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aaronblohowiak
<http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/1808>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=ramdisk+osx>

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timf
A 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.

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maukdaddy
This 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.

~~~
sp332

      Hard disk: _                     100 MB/s
      Ram disk : ____________________ 2000 MB/s
    

'K?

~~~
lsb
No, but that's not the point: anyone can be cajoled into making a graph (and I
love ASCII art as much as anyone), but the fact that there wasn't the culture
of putting a pretty ribbon on nice results, that's the problem.

~~~
patio11
Additionally, there is not-universal-but-fairly-widespread culture of contempt
for folks who make suggestions like that. "Bah, typical Excel user with your
useless eye-candy and summaries and obsession with ease of use."

I wrote an article some months back about competing with OSS, which included
some very basic advice like "If you offer software for download, you should
have a prominent button which lets people download your software". I did not
anticipate this recommendation would be controversial. I got some absolutely
priceless comments about it. My two favorites: users who can't find the
software without a big ugly button don't deserve to have it, and technically
disinclined users who are attempting to install software from the Internet are
already doing something wrong, they should be getting it from their distro's
repo instead.

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tezza
Can 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.

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timf
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

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gruseom
Does anybody here use ramback? If so, please report your experiences.

Also, what other RAM-to-HD backup mechanisms are out there?

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GvS
Any alternative for Windows?

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bemmu
On 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.

