ramdisk for browser cache?

[Kirby]

i've got a 8gb laptop, and i was thinking about making a ramdisk to use for chrome's cache. i'm using mint 9 if it matters.

when i shut the lid, it hibernates and wouldn't delete it right? i hardly ever reboot, so i thought i could make a backup folder and copy the contents over before i shut down and load them when i boot using a script or something. it'd take a while if the ramdisk is big, but i don't do it often enough where i'd think it'd be a bother.

also, i've got SABnzbd+ to automatically extract rar files and perhaps i could use a ramdisk cache instead of the harddrive. the only problem with that is if the whole file is larger than the ramdisk size, correct?

so, thoughts? is it worth it?

 

[Nothinman]

I can't imagine there would be any noticeable performance increase, do you really see pauses in browsing that you can attribute to disk I/O?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

From what I remember reading, the Chrome developers made a very conscious effort to write Chrome in an asynchronous manner from top to bottom. I can't imagine they would have missed the cache in this effort.

Furthermore, Linux has a filesystem cache that should isolate programs from waiting on disk operations (as long as they're dealing with small amounts of data, which a browser cache would be).

 

[Kirby]

I can't imagine there would be any noticeable performance increase, do you really see pauses in browsing that you can attribute to disk I/O?

haha, not really. it just seemed like something interesting to dick around with that may have some possible benefits. i've got 8gb of ram and nothing to do with it.

Furthermore, Linux has a filesystem cache that should isolate programs from waiting on disk operations (as long as they're dealing with small amounts of data, which a browser cache would be).

that's interesting. so i guess linux pretty much takes care of it. so the cache label under "free -mo" is a disk cache.

 

[Nothinman]

haha, not really. it just seemed like something interesting to dick around with that may have some possible benefits. i've got 8gb of ram and nothing to do with it.

Well if you just want to play around you can mount something as tmpfs, by default it'll set the size to 50% of your memory and it's backed by your swap space so if you start to exceed what's there it'll push pages to swap. I doubt you'll get any real benefits from using it though.

that's interesting. so i guess linux pretty much takes care of it. so the cache label under "free -mo" is a disk cache.

Windows and every non-embedded OS out there does the same thing, what varies are things like how long modified pages are allowed to exist in memory before being flushed to disk.

 

[lxskllr]

I can't imagine there would be any noticeable performance increase, do you really see pauses in browsing that you can attribute to disk I/O?

I can't comment on Chrome, but with Firefox that's a common tweak for using on a netbook with a slow SSD. I haven't bothered as of yet, but I may end up trying it at some point. I wouldn't think it would make a huge difference on a standard laptop with a standard HD.

 

[Paperlantern]

I can't comment on Chrome, but with Firefox that's a common tweak for using on a netbook with a slow SSD. I haven't bothered as of yet, but I may end up trying it at some point. I wouldn't think it would make a huge difference on a standard laptop with a standard HD.

Wait, did I miss something? SSDs are faster than standard disks, no? Since every piece of it is addressable at once, there's no seek time. SSD can be slower? Or do i understand this technology completely wrong?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Wait, did I miss something? SSDs are faster than standard disks, no? Since every piece of it is addressable at once, there's no seek time. SSD can be slower? Or do i understand this technology completely wrong?

He said "on a slow ssd." The very oldest/cheapest ssds have pretty horrible write performance. Their read performance is still pretty good though.

 

[lxskllr]

He said "on a slow ssd." The very oldest/cheapest ssds have pretty horrible write performance. Their read performance is still pretty good though.

Exactly. The SSD in my Asus is on par with a fast thumb drive ime. It works well for a very portable computer, but it's no speed demon.

 

[mfenn]

Wait, did I miss something? SSDs are faster than standard disks, no? Since every piece of it is addressable at once, there's no seek time. SSD can be slower? Or do i understand this technology completely wrong?

A pile of flash memory does not an X25-M make.

The SSDs that came with the original EeePC was more akin to a glorified USB flash drive than to a "real" SSD.