And more. You lose the fs overhead, too. I still have a swap area since
spinning up the hard drive is better than not being able to run an
executable when I need it. I use swapon manually, not in the init
scripts.
>
> Loading apps into a ramdisk ahead of time to avoid touching the harddisk
> has the disadvantage of wasting memory also. A ramdisk with filesystem
> currently is not resizeable thereby wasting memory on unused apps loaded
> into the ramdisk. You may end up using memory TWICE for the text pages of
> the same application. A definate loss.
>
> An idea that has occurred to me is a type of filesystem I'll dub ramdiskfs.
> In this hypothetical fs, text pages within executables would be shared
> with the ramdiskfs pages, thereby getting around the problem of loading
> the program into memory twice. I have no idea how practicable this idea
> is nor how to implement it at this time. This would be quite a win for
> large executables and libraries loaded into ramdisk.
This sounds great. The big win is when running off batteries.
-- Robert Wuest, PE Empowered Kemet Electronics Sirius Engineering Company by robertwuest@kemet.com mailto:rwuest@ix.netcom.com Linux