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Archaic methodology
Authored by: nyarlathotep on Jun 21, '03 12:28:04PM

I've never understood why ram disks still exist. Caching completely replaces the need for ram disks in the read-only world, i.e. everyone knows that you should never put an application in a ram disk. Likewize, improving caching technology to handle the complexities of the read-write world would seem to be the intelegent place to direct your efforts. For example, programs like ProjectBuilder could label all their intermediate build files as "unimortent / never save to disk" and label all the basic source files as "critical / cache in emergency crash resistant ram or flash." You could also have a "high preformance file" checkbox in the file info editor, but this is probably a waist of the users time. Anyway once the OS know what the use really cared about, it could just happily go about not spinning up the harddrive for extended periods of time.

Anyway, whats really needed is a block of memory which is safe from crashes, once you have that bit of hardware, the caching technology to distinguish between critical source files and unimportent build phase files will develope. Heck, you could even have running applications label some data as critical and the OS would back that data up into this safe memory (and provide facilities for recovering from it). With that little feature, no one would even need to run their HD on a 9 hour plane flight.. or worry about what files were on a ramdisk.



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Useful in the real world
Authored by: JamieF on Apr 19, '04 07:37:57PM

So what you're saying is, we should redesign the OS's cache management and filesystem semantics and rewrite all applications, to avoid what you feel is an improper technique (using a ramdisk). O-kay.

In the real world, there's software that writes temporary files that aren't needed (or which fails to access its files in such a way as to allow the OS-level filesystem cache to be as efficient as it could be), and ramdisks empower users to make that software do the right thing for their particular usage scenario.

Sometimes a simple, pragamatic solution that isn't academically pure is the Right Thing To Do because the net amount of effort that would go into the "pure" solution isn't worth that last 2% of efficiency that it would yield.



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