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.