Ram Extension?

[Norfen]

Windows 7 can add most kinds of USB and SD memory to it's paging file. Given how the Pandora is so SD centric, would we be able to extend the ram by using a SD as a paging file?

 

[darfgarf]

yes, but why would you want to? it's got more than enough as it is, and a swap file on an sd card is extremely slow (anyone who's done it on a dingoo will know just how slow )

 

[lulzfish]

Without a swap file, some RAM-hungry applications may crash or fail to start.


With a swap file, they will eat all available I/O constantly swapping in and out, and run so slow as to be unusable. And since the RAM will be swapped around all the time, I suspect it will be difficult to do anything else in any other application.


It's the difference between a program not running and a program crawling along pathetically, begging you to put it out of its misery.

 

[tsh]

To create a swap file, first use dd to create the empty file, then sudo mkswp on it to configure it, then sudo swapon on it to add it as swap. I find that frequently I use a few MB of the 128MB file I created, without it some things behave odd. Slow is better than odd in my book.

 

[WizardStan]

As mentioned, yes you can. It's strongly advised not to for performance reasons unless you really have to, though. And it should be fairly unlikely that you'll have to. If you find yourself running out of ram doing regular things, it's much more efficient to close a few tabs, or only work on one image at a time, or whatever it is you're doing.


That being said, it's probably not a bad idea to keep a little bit of swap space, just in case you do do something that suddenly requires more ram than physically available, so long as you don't start relying on it too much. It's always better to use less RAM than more

 

[Norfen]

A small file like tsh suggested actually sounds like it could be a good idea. Honestly, I was looking for a way to give my pandora a bunch of ram, just to see what It could do. Not that I have one yet, but more ram is better. This is why I don't like SOCs.

 

[Wintersdark]

A small file like tsh suggested actually sounds like it could be a good idea. Honestly, I was looking for a way to give my pandora a bunch of ram, just to see what It could do. Not that I have one yet, but more ram is better. This is why I don't like SOCs.

Yeah, it's my only complaint about the Pandora. While I realise this was a balance OPT picked between cost/capability, and that 256mb is fine for most tasks one would expect to run on it, it's still very limiting. It's comparable to most decent smartphones - and the same as the 3GS and iPad, incidentally, though they are generally narrower in scope of use, running an OS specifically designed to work within those ram constraints.


It's really too bad there's no way to make the RAM expandable.


Particularly given the expectation to run apps like Firefox, which isn't exactly efficient in regards to RAM usage. Sure, you can close tabs, but you shouldn't have to.


I'd happily pay more for a model sporting 512mb; or even a 1gb. Of course, my interests in the Pandora extend much beyond gaming - I do enjoy emulators, but my iphone can handle that fine as well with ICP. As it stands I'm struggling with a decision: Free iPhone 4 upgrade (have a 3G now) once the 4.1 jailbreak is released(I can't get a free iPhone 4 w/ 4.0.1 to jailbreak online, alas, all the store models are preupgraded to 4.0.2) and an ICP, or the Pandora. The decision comes down to, largely, which will handle general computing tasks better.

 

[Tor]

I concur with WizardStan. I've experimented with swap-on-a-card on a Nokia N800, and the N900 comes pre-setup with a quite large swap area in flash (but that's extra-fast flash for just that, mind).


Swap will never give you better performance, but (if set up correctly, i.e. the kernel has its 'swapiness' set low), it'll simply work as a handy overflow for those occasions where you'll need it (instead of some program crashing and burning just because you opened a web page that happened to be overloaded with images).

 

[Wintersdark]

What if one were to run the os off a "fast" sd card - say, a class 8-10 card - and use the NAND for the swap file?

 

[Wintersdark]

To clarify (cant edit in mobile apparently) I understand that it won't improve performance, but rather perform much better than swapping to SD.

 

[darfgarf]

use the NAND for the swap file?

most people would agree that it's a bad idea, nand isn't replaceable(realistically ), and swap files are written to quite a lot (depending on situation obviously), would be better to use an sd card, as it's replaceable if it dies

 

[Caine]

A while back there was this discussion on gp32x to store compressed pages in RAM itself.


This would be useful for running multiple application, each requiring relatively small amounts of RAM.

 

[Yannick]

Here's some perspective:


I still own and sometimes use an old Duron 900 machine with 128MB SDRam, 10yo 20GB 5400RPM HDD (slower then modern laptop harddisks)


It's running Xubuntu 10.04


It boots up with 80MB in swap and 5MB free for buffers


Surfing the web in FireFox puts 200-300 MB of data in swapfile depending on how many tabs are open


Surfing is perfectly smooth, only thing that's slow is switching between tabs and other windows (3-4 seconds of HDD activity)


Flashblock is really necessary here, that duron can't handle more then 1 flash animation at a time


So by extention, I recommend swap file, i'll use it myself


swappiness: I put it higher then default on Xubuntu (default 60, I use 90), force background programs to the swapfile, only keep usefull code in memory

 

[Tor]

To clarify (cant edit in mobile apparently) I understand that it won't improve performance, but rather perform much better than swapping to SD.

I have a swap file on a fast SD card on my N800. That's what I would recommend instead of using NAND (as darfgarf said: NAND isn't replaceable). The performance isn't really an issue, because if you start to actually use the swap space a lot you'll have a problem no matter what: You're using too many memory-hungry applications at once. If swap is used as a security net (an overflow bin) for the occasional over-use of memory then it won't matter that (even fast) SD isn't particularly fast. And that should really be the only need. My N800 has only 128MB of RAM, and I was running without any swap space for a year, lots of applications at the same time (e.g. 15 Opera browser windows and the like).


I didn't ever run out of memory (with no swap) on my N800 until I started using MicroB (firefox-based browser), it used about twice as much memory as Opera, at least the initial version. At that point I added a 128MB swap file and hasn't run out of virtual memory (VM=RAM+swap) ever since, nor are there any performance issues. Most of the time 'free' shows that swap usage is completely neglible (and this is with only 128MB of RAM).

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

Duron 900 machine

YES!

 

[Prosthetic_Mind]

Thanks for the tip on that, probably the biggest problem I have with my pandora is just that it shits itself when multitasking too much.


If I run chromium-dev with pidgin and deadbeef in the background one of the three will crash and burn within 5 minutes, and then chromium's tabs will start mysteriously dying. If I can offload that to one of my faster cards it might slow things down a bit, but it won't cause me to lose everything with no warning. 256 mb really isn't enough for netbook style use, though it seems like it's plenty for pretty much any single application. With nothing else running I generally get to around 6-7 tabs before chromium starts killing itself, which is more than enough.


Edit: Shit, who the fuck thought that it was a good idea to make the arrow button on the forum skip to the last page. Sorry about the necromancy, but this new look and feel for the forums is basically what happens when someone masturbates to the old idea of web 2.0 and splooges directly into your eyes. Either way the information is useful.


Didn't the old forum software have the option to delete your posts?


And now all the editing is fucked up because it's defaulting to html from simple post mode, christ.