When I first started running classic WU's on an old Win98 machine years ago, I had a ram disk that I had 10 megs allotted to. It made quite a difference in times I found.

Do they still exist, and more to the point, would they make any difference to crunching these days?

I feel the need...the need for speed!

When I first started running classic WU's on an old Win98 machine years ago, I had a ram disk that I had 10 megs allotted to. It made quite a difference in times I found.

Do they still exist, and more to the point, would they make any difference to crunching these days?

I feel the need...the need for speed!

I have a 320 MB RAM on my Linux box. My disk cache is now 114 MB. Is this what you mean?
Tullio

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Under Win98 and earlier, (especially windows for workgroups 3.11) assigning the TEMP directory to a ram drive accelerated many functions, especially printing large files to a parallel port became almost instantaneous. General Windows and applications performance was sped up massively in the days of WFW311 and you had 8+ megabytes of RAM.

The reasons have diminished as average amount of ram has increased, first people learned to use caching like Smartdrv.exe better, Bus mastering on the hard drive controllers became more commonplace, and Windows itself has become oriented and makes better use of the comparatively huge amounts of RAM (incorporating and improving on the caching mechanisms internally).

So depending on your applications, simply adding RAM 'should' have the same effects you once had with such efforts. Much less an effect would be noticeable with optimised seti@home science applications as they tend to be CPU bound (Rather than Disk IO bound).

Having said all that, My TEMP directory gets rather heavily loaded these days and I've been considering setting my web cache to a Ramdrive so it saves maintenance, it'd clear on restart .

... And possibly running Boinc from a RAM disk so I can let the hard disk power down (setting up some automation to handle periodic backups to permanent storage).

I wouldn't expect speed improvements but there might be other reasons you might like to try running boinc/seti like that, though special care would be needed (of course)

Jason

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"Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn't sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it's backed up by proofs." -- Algorithms to live by: The computer science of human decisions.

When I first started running classic WU's on an old Win98 machine years ago, I had a ram disk that I had 10 megs allotted to. It made quite a difference in times I found.

Do they still exist, and more to the point, would they make any difference to crunching these days?

I feel the need...the need for speed!

I used to run windows 3.11 from a RAM Drive....it started up in 5 seconds (once decompressed to the ram drive).

Anyway, if you want to play with a ram drive in win 2k/xp, install this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257405

When/If you're tired of it, just disable the RAM Driver in the Device Manager.

Hi Dissident,

I also ran Ramdisk under Seti Classic, Win98 & Pentium 2 & 3's and found an 8-10% performance gain.

I've now been testing Cinetek's RamDiskXP on a P4 3.2Ghz Prescott(s.478) under WinXP for over a year, and could NOT find any performance gain at all.

The reason for the none exsisting performance gain is probably that the harddrives are signifigant faster nowadays, the CPU's has more L2 cache and Seti Enhanced are now written to take more advantage of this L2 Cache.

The only good thing with Seti and a RamDisk nowadays - is that you'll have less wear and tear on the harddrive.

Regards
Kiva

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Greetings from Norway

Crunch3er & AK-V8 Inside

Thanks for the replies. I kind of figured with the advances in hardware they may be redundant, with the exception of the HDD wear. Still, good to know.

Cheers!

... with the exception of the HDD wear. ...

HDD wear is not what you might guess...

Google did a very good study on their vast array of HDDs and found that HDD usage made very little difference on HDD life. Much more important was to keep within a good operating temperature range, and to avoid vibration.

You may gain extended life if you can allow the HDDs to spin down into power saving and stay spun down for many hours at a time. Otherwise, best is to keep them spinning and minimise power cycling and thermal cycling.


Also note that any OS that can be considered 'good' will implement good filesystem caching utilising all unused RAM. That acts pretty much like a very flexible RAMdisk in itself.

Happy (long) crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Also note that any OS that can be considered 'good' will implement good filesystem caching utilising all unused RAM. That acts pretty much like a very flexible RAMdisk in itself.

Does this mean you'll actually admit that Vista's SuperFetch technology makes the OS 'good'? ;-)

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I have looked at RamDisk drivers off and on but I have never been able to find a free driver for windows that will do greater then a 3GB ram drive. Does anyone know of such an animal?

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I have looked at RamDisk drivers off and on but I have never been able to find a free driver for windows that will do greater then a 3GB ram drive. Does anyone know of such an animal?

With 32bit Windows applications, there is a 2GB application limit that can be extended to 3GB when using certain tricks (which can also make Windows unstable or other software unstable), and a 4GB hard limit to 32bit memory addressing.

Any more than that would require software that supports AMD's 48bit memory addressing found in all of their Athlon64 CPUs and newer (or any Intel CPU that supports EM64T). I have not seen such a RAMDisk application available as of yet.

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I have looked at RamDisk drivers off and on but I have never been able to find a free driver for windows that will do greater then a 3GB ram drive. Does anyone know of such an animal?

With 32bit Windows applications, there is a 2GB application limit that can be extended to 3GB when using certain tricks (which can also make Windows unstable or other software unstable), and a 4GB hard limit to 32bit memory addressing.

Any more than that would require software that supports AMD's 48bit memory addressing found in all of their Athlon64 CPUs and newer (or any Intel CPU that supports EM64T). I have not seen such a RAMDisk application available as of yet.

Well that or just the extended addressing that has been around for a while for workstations/servers that are 32 bit but have more then 4GB of ram.

But other then RamDisk drivers that have to be paid for I haven't seen anything over 3GB as well.

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Does this mean you'll actually admit that Vista's SuperFetch technology makes the OS 'good'? ;-)

I'm sure you know that that logic doesn't follow...

See: Logical Conditional

More of a question is why has it taken a decade or so for Windows to catch up with other OSes for that rudimentary performance feature?

... Oh, I know... It was so that you could have all those 3rd parties develop RAMdisks!

:-p

Happy crunchin',

;-)

Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Well that or just the extended addressing that has been around for a while for workstations/servers that are 32 bit but have more then 4GB of ram.

But other then RamDisk drivers that have to be paid for I haven't seen anything over 3GB as well.

That would be Intel's 36bit addressing that has been in place since the Pentium Pro (the first in the P6 microarchitecture). The only problem is, you must be using an OS that is also using 36bit addressing. If you're using a 32bit OS and attempt to use a 36bit-aware app, it will cause problems with the OS's memory protection.

Windows NT,2000,XP and Vista 32bit all only support 32bit memory addresses.

Windows XP x64, Vista x64 and most Windows server OSes support up to 48bit addressing.

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I'm sure you know that that logic doesn't follow...

Sure it does. You didn't offer any additional qualifiers to indicate that any particular OS was excluded from your statement. You said:

Also note that any OS that can be considered 'good' will implement good filesystem caching utilising all unused RAM. That acts pretty much like a very flexible RAMdisk in itself.

(my emphasis added)

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Windows NT,2000,XP and Vista 32bit all only support 32bit memory addresses.

Windows XP x64, Vista x64 and most Windows server OSes support up to 48bit addressing.

However Win2k3 does support the 36bit address and that is the OS I am using. It has 16GB of ram and it would be nice to try out something with a ram disk but I would need greater then 3GB to do it.

From the link below it seems that Ram Disk type support might be a bit different then just the memory access but I'm not really positive.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/pae_os.mspx

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I'm sure you know that that logic doesn't follow...

Sure it does. You didn't offer any additional qualifiers to indicate that any particular OS was excluded from your statement. You said:

Also note that any OS that can be considered 'good' will implement good filesystem caching utilising all unused RAM. That acts pretty much like a very flexible RAMdisk in itself.

(my emphasis added)

Think through the logic for that...

(As described in the link that I gave.)

To tabulate that statement to emphasise the meaning and implication:

OS, good filesystem caching:

good, must do yes;

bad, can do (yes and no).


Please see the Logical Conditional link.

Happy crunchin',
Martin

[edit] Rewording to 'work backwards', having filesystem caching does not necessarily mean that the OS must be good. [/edit]

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Windows NT,2000,XP and Vista 32bit all only support 32bit memory addresses.

Windows XP x64, Vista x64 and most Windows server OSes support up to 48bit addressing.

However Win2k3 does support the 36bit address and that is the OS I am using.

Well, Win2k3 is a server OS, and that would fit into "Windows XP x64, Vista x64 and most server OSes". ;-)

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[edit] Rewording to 'work backwards', having filesystem caching does not necessarily mean that the OS must be good. [/edit]

Then by that same reverse logic, Linux isn't necessarily a good OS either. ;-)


(You're trying so hard to avoid saying it, I'll give you credit for that. But I'm afraid we're just doing wordplay now. lol )

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[quote][edit] Rewording to 'work backwards', having filesystem caching does not necessarily mean that the OS must be good. [/edit]

Then by that same reverse logic, Linux isn't necessarily a good OS either. ;-)

Indeed so, but then, that wasn't the point of the statement. The point was that of timing of implementation and the level of development assumed from that...

(You're trying so hard to avoid saying it, I'll give you credit for that. But I'm afraid we're just doing wordplay now. lol )

I'll certainly say horses for courses.

So you were just having selective logical blindness to try to score a point?


If you're reduced to that, then there must be little virtue left for your favoured OS if you've abandonded all the other features!

:-p


BTW: Just 'lost' 3 hours of my life recovering a WinXP Home system. The user data wasn't lost but it came down to having to do a "Repair installation" and then reinstall various drivers, SP2, and 74 security updates...

And all on the Microsoft teaser that it must be 'fixed' by now until, oh no, yet another install/update and another reboot required... :-(


Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Come on Martin,,,,You're forgetting the updates you had to do after installing an update. You know, update to .net, then get update for .net. Get windows media player 10, then get update for media player, then have to get security update, for media player. All, one step at a time.

I actually had this conversation (or similar) with my mom.

mom: tony it says I need updates, but I just did the updates.

tony: I know mom, now you need the updates for the updates.

mom: that's why I never do them. (note: she's on dial up)