Anyone running Seti on a Ram Drive?

[santar72]

I been thinking about running Seti's Cli client on a Ram drive. Is it much faster or am I wasting my time. How stable is it?

 

[cnhoff]

For me, a possible speed increase was the main motivation for trying out a ramdisc and I was disappointed. The Wu took exactly the same time as when Seti was running from a harddisc. Also my hd was spinning up about once an hour, which is certainly much worse for the hd than running all the time, so I think you would definetely be wasting your time with a ramdisc!

 

[santar72]

No speed increase at all? So much for that idea. Must think of some more idea to make quicker WU besides buying a mainframe.

 

[Sukhoi]

Athlon 4's rock at SETI...

 

[CyGoR]

Eh.. guys? I am currently using a ramdrive for Win2K called "RamdiskNT". I do notice a nice speed increasment. My HD is set to off after 30mins. and RamdiskNT makes a backup of the ramdrive every 5 ours. My system is very stable so 5 ours is good enough. But when it crashes I lose everything on it. First one WU was cruncht in about 15ours on a Dual Celeron (Abit BP6) I run 2 clients at the same time, one on both processors. When I run just one client is takes about 13ours. Anyway, now it only takes about 12ours even when I run 2 clients!! So that gives me a profit of 3ours x 2 = 6ours total!!
You could just try it out, maybe it works for you aswell..
Don't mind my crappy English please..
Dutch Rules...

 

[Netopia]

CyGoR,

I don't know anything about SETI... or at least almost nothing.... but... my guess is that you saw the dramatic increase because SETI makes use of your CPU's level 2 Cache quite a bit. With your small L2 cache, there is probably less of a performace hit when you run all in memory. I could be wrong, but that is perhaps why you saw a difference and others didn't.

Joe

 

[Poof]

I'd agree with Netopia. Most of what SETI is doing regarding disk access is writing to the state file. However having a Celly with only 128K L2 would mean more of the program being shunted into the RAM and then later to a pagefile, than would occur with a P3/P4, the Xeons, or Tbirds. Keeping that stuff out of the pagefile would help performance in any case.

 

[Assimilator1]

Interesting info here ,that should be added to an advanced FAQ