Ramdrive and T42 and Youtube & better than SSD performance

[fefrie]

I've finally decided to try a ramdrive as a place for the cache for my Opera Web Browser.

I have to say that youtube works much better now.

I have a t42 with 2gb ram and 64mb video, and I allocated 256mb of ram to the ramdrive.

Youtube works great. I can set the quality to 480p and there is no stuttering. I'm 'precaching' a 720p video, and it seems to work really well.

[Johan]

... very interesting - thanks for sharing!

Question: Would you perhaps be kind to share - in all details, please! - how exactly you have set up the mentioned "RAMdrive" in your T42; what software you are using (and where did you get if from; some free download e.g?), how any settings have been configured, what OS (e.g XP or Windows 7?) you are using etc... simply all the details so it is as easy as nothing for the rest of us to benefit from your success? Also: Is it necessary to configure e.g. Opera to take advantage of the RAMdrive, or does this just happen by itself, purely automatically?

Thanks very much in advance!

PS: Do you have any idea about whether such a RAMdrive may also be advantageous for other applications, such as e.g. the OS itself (XP or Win 7), and/or other applications? Reason for asking is that I'm always interested in hints about how to speed up my trusty T42p!

Johan

[fefrie]

http://envyandroid.com/archives/381/spe ... -a-ramdisk

Essentially you are creating a drive made of ram that is very fast. I HD tached the drive and I achieved 800mb/s performance.

You can install any application you want to start/work faster, although with my limited ram, I just put the browser cache.

If I had more RAM than 2gb, I would install my browser or any other programs I want to load fast.

The link is enough for you to start a search for yourself and I would highly recommend this. Wish I did it sooner.

This little makes the processor the true bottleneck.

If I had 3gb ram, I'd start putting all temp folders on it.

[fefrie]

Biggest difference I notice so far?

I can 'cache' 2 or more Youtube pages at the same time and saturate my internet connection. Previously, the video would stutter and would only load approximately 3mb of my 6 mb connection

[ilakast]

Thanks for the tip fefrie.

Did the same with my T60 and Opera now (in general, not only youtube) is amazingly faster. Allocated 200MB from a total of 1.5Gb I currently have. Indeed, I wish I had know much earlier.

[GACrabill]

http://envyandroid.com/archives/381/spe ... -a-ramdisk

Essentially you are creating a drive made of ram that is very fast. I HD tached the drive and I achieved 800mb/s performance.

You can install any application you want to start/work faster, although with my limited ram, I just put the browser cache.

Thank you very much! Great link and surprisingly easy.

I have moved the Win7 IE10 Temporary Internet Files folder on both a T60 and a T40 to a RAMdisk drive. Seems like a much better place for this type of file vs. having it reside on the SSD.

[fefrie]

I've taken the next step and tried an opera portable installation onto a 512mb ram drive. I thinks it's as fast as it's going to be.

Not blazingly fast, or maybe it's my slow internet connection. It is better though. Whatever it is, there is no hard drive bottleneck anymore.

I recommend a drive monitor to make sure that there is enough space in the ram drive. Once it fills, the internet stops working.

Next step is to try to transfer temp folders from the windows system onto the ram drive.

[fefrie]

Thanks for the tip fefrie.

Did the same with my T60 and Opera now (in general, not only youtube) is amazingly faster. Allocated 200MB from a total of 1.5Gb I currently have. Indeed, I wish I had know much earlier.

What is your internet connection speed? Mine is only 6mb.

And how is it with your faster ram, you don't get much faster results?

How do you get that graph?

[DRobinson]

I use ram file system on my machines that use solid state drives. I think it should extend the life span of the drive by limiting writes to them. In linux you add the following to /etc/fstab.

Code: Select all

tmpfs /tmp      tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Ram drive size is dynamic, and defaults to 50%max(I think). i have never run into any issues using this, and it does improve performance substantially.

[ilakast]

What is your internet connection speed? Mine is only 6mb.

And how is it with your faster ram, you don't get much faster results?

How do you get that graph?

This is my intenet speed

I don't have a working thinkpad with DDR ram to compare DDR vs. DDR2 at the moment. There's definitely a speed improve.

This is a HDD benchmark software: CrystaldiskMark

[DRobinson]

I don't have a working thinkpad with DDR ram to compare DDR vs. DDR2 at the moment. There's definitely a speed improve.

I do. Here is a test I did on my T42 and T60 for comparison. Ram drive write and read vs SSD. T42 is using 266x compact flash, T60 is using crucial V4 sata2. I am dissapointed with the V4, it appears to only be as fast as what 300x compact flash would be.

T60 ram appears to be twice as fast as the PC2700 in the T42.

Here is the test:
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-so ... test-31069

Here are my results (I only wrote 200MB to ram drive to ensure I did not use swap.):

Code: Select all

me@Thinkpad-T42-01:~$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/ddfile bs=8k count=25000 && sync"
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 0.563176 s, 364 MB/s

real	0m0.680s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.624s

me@Thinkpad-T42-01:~$ time dd if=/tmp/ddfile of=/dev/null bs=8k
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 0.251749 s, 814 MB/s

me@Thinkpad-T42-01:~$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile bs=8k count=250000 && sync"
250000+0 records in
250000+0 records out
2048000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 62.4577 s, 32.8 MB/s

real 1m22.747s
user 0m0.200s
sys 0m8.041s

me@Thinkpad-T42-01:~$ time dd if=ddfile of=/dev/null bs=8k
250000+0 records in
250000+0 records out
2048000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 30.4631 s, 67.2 MB/s

real 0m30.478s
user 0m0.156s
sys 0m5.064s

me@Thinkpad-T42-01:~$

me@ThinkPad-T60:~/Desktop$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/ddfile bs=8k count=25000 && sync"
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 0.267494 s, 766 MB/s

real	0m0.293s
user	0m0.024s
sys	0m0.248s

me@ThinkPad-T60:~/Desktop$ time dd if=/tmp/ddfile of=/dev/null bs=8k
25000+0 records in
25000+0 records out
204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 0.139238 s, 1.5 GB/s

real	0m0.142s
user	0m0.008s
sys	0m0.132s

me@ThinkPad-T60:~/Desktop$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile bs=8k count=250000 && sync"
250000+0 records in
250000+0 records out
2048000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 49.0702 s, 41.7 MB/s

real	0m57.142s
user	0m0.144s
sys	0m42.491s

me@ThinkPad-T60:~/Desktop$ time dd if=ddfile of=/dev/null bs=8k
250000+0 records in
250000+0 records out
2048000000 bytes (2.0 GB) copied, 29.5601 s, 69.3 MB/s

real	0m29.565s
user	0m0.140s
sys	0m29.014s

me@ThinkPad-T60:~/Desktop$ 

[fefrie]

Due to the Small size of the ram drive, I had to install a drive size monitor

http://sourceforge.net/projects/traydiskfree/

and create a keyboard shortcut to delete the cache whenever it runs too small.

Deleting the cache manually, I will loose cookies of sorts for some reason.

It's only ever an issue when viewing streaming video and the video caches.

I wish that video caching was only really limited for 10-15 minutes, and after that it expires and deletes.

[Cigarguy]

Ah Ramdrive, haven't played with that since DOS 6.22. A Ramdrive to a SSD is like a SSD to a floppy. There's not comparison. I wish more software manufacture would make it easier to utilize such device. Modern OSs and software are suppose to handle all of this and on the most part they do. Assuming you have a fairly modern machine with lots of RAM.

Still, can't beat a Ramdrive. Used to run Wordperfect from a Ramdrive.

[Medessec]

I'd imagine you can get great use of a Ramdrive system from a desktop computer... friends of mine have built i7 monsters with 32GB of RAM. I always thought anything over 8GB was a bit overkill... why would you need any more if all you do is game? I suppose now there's a good use for all that extra RAM.

However I can't see the same thing working on laptops. I'd want to preserve what RAM I have. A lot of software I use hogs RAM, and Vista/7 cache themselves in the RAM, etc.

[fefrie]

Depends on what you use your laptop for. Mine is websurfing, so it works for me.

[newyorkpaulie]

Ah Ramdrive, haven't played with that since DOS 6.22. A Ramdrive to a SSD is like a SSD to a floppy. There's not comparison. I wish more software manufacture would make it easier to utilize such device. Modern OSs and software are suppose to handle all of this and on the most part they do. Assuming you have a fairly modern machine with lots of RAM.

Still, can't beat a Ramdrive. Used to run Wordperfect from a Ramdrive.

You say: "A Ramdrive to a SSD is like a SSD to a floppy." Are you saying that even if you use a SSD a Ramdrive is better? Find that hard to believe, but if it's true I will jump on the Ramdrive wagon too! Please let me know. Thanks.

[fefrie]

Another tweak to my Opera portable installation. Increase max number of connections to 128 to server/internet.

Seems to work quicker.....

[systemBuilder]

What is the opera default number of connections? I think that by default, firefox uses only 4 TCP's, which should be plenty in most cases. I think the average web page only has 40-60 objects, so allowing 128 TCP connections might be overkill.

In a properly architected browser, only the root web page and the style sheet are necessary to draw the web page, and the rest of the content (pictures, shockwave flash, etc.) can download progressively in the background while you read the text of the web page. Scrolling, etc. should become possible after just 1 or 2 packets of the root web page have arrived.

[ilakast]

By the way, I gave Opera Next a go and it is even faster than using a ramdrive!

http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/unified/1500n/