Silly idea about ram disk

Half_Elf · 02-23-2003, 12:05 PM

About ram disk...
Today computer has an huge amount of RAM, and it's mostly unused (except for some really heavy apps, who need 768MB of RAM??) .
Why not to put swap space on RAM? I know it seems very stupid, but since Ram is faster than the HD, considering everyone has too much ram anyways, why not wasting some (something like 256MB ?) for swap, to save few disk wear?

Crashed_Again · 02-23-2003, 12:07 PM

I was under the impression that swap space was only used once there was no more room left in RAM. Am I wrong?

cuckoopint · 02-23-2003, 01:08 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Crashed_Again
I was under the impression that swap space was only used once there was no more room left in RAM. Am I wrong?

nope. (atleast I don't think so...)

unless your configuration is messed up, and starts using the swap before it uses up all of the RAM (win9x was notorious for this)

\edit
BTW, Half_Elf, the idea to use ram as a virtual HD has existed for a long time, most notably seen in boot disks (both win and linux) which used part of the RAM to create a virtual disk onto which a kernel and useful commands were put on. hence, one could change a floppy and still be able to do some work.

moses · 02-23-2003, 11:37 PM

At work, I will ALWAYS need more RAM than what is available.
At home, I can usually get away with 512-1024 MB, but not
always, and it's for the same reason -- I typically work with
100MB to 2GB images, and the processing of said images
requires anywhere from 2-10 times as much memory as the image
size. Swapping to disk sucks, it's always better to keep
everything in memory, where it's faster. Unfortunately, it gets
pretty expensive to get as much memory as is needed. . .

Tarential · 02-24-2003, 12:02 AM

512 megs SDRam costs 79 bucks here... (Canadian funds).

Which means it'd be pretty dang cheap to get a lot of ram if you wanted.

I run 512 meg DDR.