what to do with extra ram

whitethorn · 2010-05-20 01:37:32

My computer has 8Gb of ram, arch is only using around 603 Mb according to conky and little over 3Gb with free -m. Meaning I have over 4 Gb left over for whatever. What would be a good way to use the extra ram to speed stuff up? Would creating a couple ramdisks be useful?

sand_man · 2010-05-20 01:44:05

Check out this wiki article http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ramdisk

karol · 2010-05-20 01:48:39

Use Ubuntu on a VM installed on Vista installed on a VM installed on Arch.
Hardware -> Arch -> VM -> Vista -> VM -> Ubuntu -> Apps

You can substitute Vista with Fedora.

Seriously speaking, first measure, then speed up the slowest tasks. What is the most irritating part of your work? Do you dread the five seconds it takes to open an app?
If I were you, I would sell some RAM and got beer / ice cream.

whitethorn · 2010-05-20 01:54:01

I already had a looked at that, what I was looking for were ways to speed up opening applications and stuff like that. I found an interesting post in a forum, I have no idea how to go about getting something like this to work

I just tried an alternative: booting from a RAID 1 array made of a writable storage device (HDD, flash drive, whatever) and a ramdisk. It's kinda awesome. The system boots from the array with only one member (the permanent storage device), then you hot-add the second member (which is the ramdisk: /dev/rd/0); the rebuilding takes place in the background, and the array can be accessed simultaneously. No initrd required if /boot is on its own partition.
The trick is to mark the permanent storage member of the array as "write-mostly" (and optionally "write-behind") with mdadm when you first create the array; once the ramdisk is added after the system's booted (mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/rd/0 in /etc/rc.local, for instance), all (or most) reads are made from the ramdisk. Writes are somewhat faster (not much more than with the system running on the storage device alone), but the big advantage comes from the ramdisk's ability to be read from and written to concurrently with no speed or latency penalty. X.org, Firefox, The GIMP, everything loads instantly, even when lots of small write operations are being made.
What makes this solution different, is that changes to the system are saved either immediately (if the "write-behind" parameter was not used) or shortly thereafter. I'm experimenting with this setup to see how it does in the long run, what I can tweak, etc…

whitethorn · 2010-05-20 02:00:42

karol wrote:

Use Ubuntu on a VM installed on Vista installed on a VM installed on Arch.
Hardware -> Arch -> VM -> Vista -> VM -> Ubuntu -> Apps
You can substitute Vista with Fedora.

Seriously speaking, first measure, then speed up the slowest tasks. What is the most irritating part of your work? Do you dread the five seconds it takes to open an app?
If I were you, I would sell some RAM and got beer / ice cream.

lol I was actually thinking of selling 2 sticks and .. beer hmmm. But a friend mentioned something about ramdisks and I thought why not give it a try. I don't really mind the wait, but if it could be faster...

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-20 01:37:32

what to do with extra ram

#2 2010-05-20 01:44:05

Re: what to do with extra ram

#3 2010-05-20 01:48:39

Re: what to do with extra ram

#4 2010-05-20 01:54:01

Re: what to do with extra ram

#5 2010-05-20 02:00:42

Re: what to do with extra ram

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