Re: Partition Sizing

Mike A. Harris (mharris@ican.net)
Fri, 23 Jul 1999 01:37:50 -0400 (EDT)


On Fri, 23 Jul 1999, Alexander Viro wrote:

>> It is called a ramdisk. I believe there is a howto. I can't see
>
>memfs != ramdisk. Moreover, arguments below are pretty much void - memfs
>doesn't grab the chunk of RAM to hold. Its blocks can be paged out, on
>the same basis as pages of any process.
>
>> how in todays technology age that ANY ramdisk speeds up ANY
>> system for ANY reason though. The memory is better used as
>> cache, etc... Forcing it to ramdisk needlessly wastes the unused
>> space IMHO.
>
> You do not force it.
>
>> I've yet to see anyone provide useful benchmark results that show
>> benefits of running ramdisks.
>
> Sure, but it's *not* a ramdisk you are thinking of. Memfs has its
>suckitude but it's completely different one.

Ok, I didn't realize that memfs was not a ramdisk. Aside from
that, I think my arguments about ramdisks sucking nowadays are
valid. Nonetheless I see people in both Linux and win95 wasting
valuable memory on their systems by putting various things into
ramdisk and I get a chuckle because if all those programs really
were used that often, they would be in cache memory anyways, and
not permanently. ;o)

Take care,
TTYL

--
Mike A. Harris                   Linux advocate      GNU advocate
Computer Consultant                          Open Source advocate  

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot...

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