), and using the OS its caching, resulting in more speed, then anything else ( and saves your HD from those horrible I/O requests ).I was always told it is pretty hard to get "real" free memory in Linux, exactly because the OS tends to gobble up all the RAM and use it as swap (which is the sensible thing to do. No use in letting all that RAM rot away).'Benjiro' said:
Not at all... I think you are using the wrong term. Swap = file on HD. You mean cache.'Karel Jansens' said:
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You certainly could if you think you'd get a decent speed increase for something drive intensive by having a 128 meg ramdrive. That said I personally think the ideas a tad insane because I don't think there's going to be any issues with loading time off the SD cards. I think the availability of the ram itself might help speed things a tad more... at least in cacheing things you run often. Alot of the optimization benefit of ramdrives is taken care of by the linux kernel itself if the rams free. Though if you want to do it cause its a cool thing to do then go right ahead.'mali' said:
I'm a real linux n00b, but judging from some post on this board I figured, that linux handles memory completely different(more efficient) than XP, Vista. The latest JKK video about his modified Aigo(512MB RAM, XP embedded) made me think about it. He used a technique that completely bypasses the SSD and writes everything to RAM. I was very impressed by the internet browsing speed without any lag.'fireball87' said:
It handles it more efficiently more then different yes. Ram drives only can optimized things that are actually reads/writes from the hard-disk. When you load something in linux for the first time (a load time that is going to happen some time even with a ram disk... where it would happen at boot cause things aren't just going to appear in ram, which loses its content every time the machine loses power or is turned completely off) it will cache what you've loaded for as long as there is still memory left to store it. A ramdisk is basically telling the kernel you know what to optimize more then it does, so for very specific things it will give a speed boost but only on disk read/write operations (a database which writes every change to the hard drive would get a huge speedboost for example). Firefox would never get much of a boost off of a ramdisk since it doesn't read or write much from the hard drive. It would load much much faster, but other then that it should run nearly the same speed (unnoticeable faster since it doesn't read or write all that much information). I theorize that the speed of firefox you noticed was more do to other optimizations and factors then the speed of the ram drive. And since when is firefox not snappy on a halfway decent system with 512 megs of ram?'mali' said:
--edit-- the unionfs explanation is way better/more current/accurate then mine so I'm going to edit this to hold more useful information. I'll leave the post up real small incase someone wants to read and judge me and so forth.'mali' said:
