PC still playing Amiga catchup

[stefcep2]

Erm, that's a bit of a silly way to put it. Really big files aren't going to fit comfortably into memory either. Chances are they'll get paged out to hard disk anyway.



That really depends on your filesystem. Using your Amiga's RAM disk to save disk fragmentation is all well and good but you're ultimately just fragmenting the memory instead. Which isn't a great idea. With 256MB of ram, I've been unable to run an application needing 32MB without a reboot due to this issue.



Use /tmp for your dumping ground and use tmpwatch. Problem solved.



Sure, that's handy sometimes.

Incidentally, you do realise that RAM disks are available on other operating systems, right?

For example:



Et voila, a 16MiB ram disk. It's actually more like RAD, in that it's fixed size, but like RAM: it's entirely volatile.

I was thinking more of windows regarding fragmentation.  I've never experienced the RAM: fragmentation due to reading and writing to the RAM: disk.  i used it to store animation frames, which then color reduced, resized, deleted and replaced with the processed frames, which were finally compressed into an animation automatically with an arexx script.

One of the features of the Amiga's ram: disk is that its dynamic, only as big as it needs to be and handles transparently for the user by the OS. Can this be done in Linux ?

[ElPolloDiabl]

I get a feeling is designed around manipulated big files. e.g. a spreadsheet or a powerpoint presentation. Also it would optimised (not the best choice of words) for larger hard drives.
It's only us (ex)Amigans that notice it's poor performance on small files, include mp3/mp4 sized files. (Yes I know EIDE drives on the Amiga were slow, I was lucky enough to have SCSI II on my A2000)

[alexatkin]

Erm, that's a bit of a silly way to put it. Really big files aren't going to fit comfortably into memory either. Chances are they'll get paged out to hard disk anyway.



That really depends on your filesystem. Using your Amiga's RAM disk to save disk fragmentation is all well and good but you're ultimately just fragmenting the memory instead. Which isn't a great idea. With 256MB of ram, I've been unable to run an application needing 32MB without a reboot due to this issue.



Use /tmp for your dumping ground and use tmpwatch. Problem solved.



Sure, that's handy sometimes.

Incidentally, you do realise that RAM disks are available on other operating systems, right?

For example:



Et voila, a 16MiB ram disk. It's actually more like RAD, in that it's fixed size, but like RAM: it's entirely volatile.

I actually shoved 8GB of RAM into my Linux box and stuck /tmp into tmpfs as well as commonly used users tmp directories.  Its very handly and there is still plenty of RAM left for normal caching.  For example the first login to KDE is quite slow, the second login is lightening fast.

You also forgot to mention that tmpfs has a fixed size but not a fixed size in memory.  It only uses as much RAM as its contents and if it gets full it pages itself to disk.

Though, how did we end up on this subject anyway?  It doesn't have any bearing on the thread that I can see.

[Karlos]

I was thinking more of windows regarding fragmentation.  I've never experienced the RAM: fragmentation due to reading and writing to the RAM: disk.  i used it to store animation frames, which then color reduced, resized, deleted and replaced with the processed frames, which were finally compressed into an animation automatically with an arexx script.

Put one large file (ie around half the free memory) into the ram disk, a small file, then another large one. Now delete the two large files and leave the smaller one. Chances are, your available free memory is split into two big chunks.

One of the features of the Amiga's ram: disk is that its dynamic, only as big as it needs to be and handles transparently for the user by the OS. Can this be done in Linux ?

Not sure, I've never tried it. Probably not, at least not the way I suggested earlier.

-edit-

You also forgot to mention that tmpfs has a fixed size but not a fixed size in memory. It only uses as much RAM as its contents and if it gets full it pages itself to disk.

There you go then

[Karlos]

I should point out that under ext3 etc, "large files" in linux are only as large as their contents too, due to sparse file support. Instead of allocating N empty blocks for a large file on disk, it only allocates blocks that are written to.

[Karlos]

For example the first login to KDE is quite slow, the second login is lightening fast.

I totally gave up on KDE with 4.x *shudder*

[stefcep2]

still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.

What about Windows?  Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..

[ElPolloDiabl]

Found one, game over plyr 1:

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

[juan_fine]

still, its not as simple as having a ram disk icon and dragging stuff in an out of it right from the time you boot up.

What about Windows?  Never seen or even heard anyone doing it..

google: Results 1 - 10 of about 18,300,000 for windows ram disk
doh

[Karlos]

google: Results 1 - 10 of about 18,300,000 for windows ram disk
doh

Results 1 - 10 of about 74,900 for amiga ram disk.

Bugger! :lol:

Failed at googlewar.

[stefcep2]

Found one, game over plyr 1:

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php

what was interesting about this was this:

"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."

So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue.  Quite simply, they aren't.

secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and

Thirdly $50!!!!!!  or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that.  Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..

[bloodline]

what was interesting about this was this:

"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."

So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue.  Quite simply, they aren't.

secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and

Thirdly $50!!!!!!  or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that.  Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..

RAM is precious... if you want super duper mega ultra highspeed large storage... then you use an SSD... but to be honest I find a nice modern ordinary Harddrive fast enough... even my laptop drive is fast enough for 24bit/96Khz multitrack recording!

[Karlos]

@stefcep2

Don't conflate seek times with transfer rates. For large files seek time is usually insignificant compared to the time taken to read or write the data. Here, transfer rates dominate. Now, RAM is certainly faster than hard disk here too, but what you have to consider is whether or not it matters. When streaming blue ray content, for example, existing SATA drives have ample transfer speeds, so you don't gain anything from putting it in RAM.

Conversely, for repeated access to lots of small files, seek times dominate. However, modern hard disks tend to have large caches to mitigate this and filesystems may add additional memory based caching on top of that too.

[juan_fine]

what was interesting about this was this:

"The most important difference between a RAM disk and a hard disk is access speed. The time taken for a hard disk to move its magnetic heads over the spinning disks (much like the arm moving over old vinyl record player) is typically measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). Whereas a RAM disk does not have mechanical parts and its access speed is typically measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second). Access to a RAM disk may be 50 times faster or more than to a hard drive."

So that addresses the "hard drives are fast enough" issue.  Quite simply, they aren't.

secondly, since an argument against executive was that its a third party utility-now freeware but did cost 10 pound. this is a third part utility, and

Thirdly $50!!!!!!  or $100 if you want to use an OS that sees more than 3 gig ram, and if you're gonna use a ram disk in windows you'd want to be able to do that.  Thats more than half the price of of an OEM version of the OS itself..

 Results 1 - 10 of about 10,800,000 for free windows ram disk

[ElPolloDiabl]

CD32 vs SNES:

Q: How big was the SNES marketing in the USA?
In Australia the C64 and the A500 were the most popular games machine until Playstation came along.

In May, Nintendo's Wii console sold 289,500 units; Microsoft sold 175,000 Xbox 360 consoles. Sony's PlayStation 3 trailed behind with 131,000 units, and actually sold 117,000 PlayStation 2 consoles. Kotick said that because the Wii and Xbox 360 are selling so well, games generate a better return on invested capital than they do on the PlayStation 3. He also added that Sony's games division lost $597 million last year, and it may need to risk more losses if the PlayStation 3 is to evolve.

This is what I was talking about, the Playstation 2 is still selling under the inertia of its games. Not everyone wants the latest, shiniest, fastest.

[amigaksi]

Yeah, the reason for backward compatibility is to provide a bridge so that software manufacturers can catch up with the new system.  You provide it for a reasonable amount of time and then you move on.  The only reason anyone is interested in running 15+ year old software for the Amiga is because the company that produced the Amiga *DIED* 15 years ago.  If they had survived *nobody* would care if the current Amiga OS was compatible with with the old stuff.

I couldn't do 10% of what I do now on 15 year old software.  Life moves on.  That's the way in the computer world.  In the Mac world Carbon is finally being put to bed, it's junk but it had to be there initially, now it's just a waste of good electrons...  This is what happens in living systems.  You evolve and progress or you die.

Believe it or not some software is more efficiently done in real-mode.  You get to take over the system and write software that works almost exactly as you want it (not as good as Amiga) but as close as you can get it.  Win98SE, Win 3.x, DOS, and some others still support real mode.  I still use MS-Word 2.0-- it's fast and loads almost instantly and the OS to use it fits on a floppy drive.