Using RamDisk type program to speed up WU's?

[ShotgunSi]

Anyone tried this before?
I'm running a shareware version that creates a virtual Hard Drive in your RAM. Seems to be a little bit faster, but I won't know until the WU finishes completly.
Running W2K with the Command Line Version and Setispy.

 

[teriba]

It shouldn't be much faster. The hard drive is barely accessed while doing SETI and it only needs 32MB of RAM.

 

[RaySun2Be]

Best test would be to grab the "Benchmark" WU from Ars Technica, and run it with, and without the ramdisk, everything else being equal, including no other use of the PC at the time of testing for both tests.

It will be interesting to see the results.

 

[Engineer]

The only downside to this would be if the PC resets or crashes without backing up the WU info to the HD....then you start over!

OUCH!

Could lose much more over time than gained....

 

[Fardringle]

Could set up a scheduled task to run every five minutes (or whatever) to copy all of the contents of the temporary drive (except lock.sah) to a permanent place on the hard drive. That way, even in the case of a crash you'll never lose much work.

Of course, the overhead in running a task that often (maybe 30 minutes is better?) might counteract the slight improvement from using the RAM drive.

 

[ShotgunSi]

The Ramdisk program i'm running has a built in feature that backs up the Ram Disk ever X seconds.

Also it has the feature of saving the contents of the Ram Disk on Shutdown and reloading the Ram Disk on Boot Up.

 

[Fardringle]

That sounds like a pretty cool program. What is it?

What are your results so far with your test?

 

[ShotgunSi]

<< That sounds like a pretty cool program. What is it?

What are your results so far with your test? >>



Here is a link for the program.
http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm

No results yet, I won't get a chance to look at it until later.
So far its a P3 450 Oced to 557, 128MB Ram running Win95 OSR2 with the screen saver version of Seti.

I switched to W2K with the CLI version installed on a 10MB Ramdisk. It should speed things up a lot, although mostly due to switching OS'es and moving to the CLI version of Seti

 

[RaySun2Be]

So any conclusions or stats yet?

 

[SoulAssassin]

<< So any conclusions or stats yet?

>>



I'm waiting to hear any stats myself, but I don't expect any significant gains.

 

[Def]

I'd say that using a RAM drive shouldn't be more than a few seconds faster than a modern HDD.

Keep in mind that a HDD is only relatively slow when compared to the access times of other components, and only programs with constant Disk I/O activity will see any benefit when moving to a RAM Drive. Some people have even reported running Seti on a floppy. There was alot of accessing at the beginning of the WU, then only very sparse accessing of the data through most the processing. So if you can run off a SLOW-AZZ floppy drive and not kill a WU time, I doubt a much much faster modern HDD will add up to much total time during the course of a WU.

But I commend your efforts for trying to speed up Seti. Shows you are made of the "right stuff'!

 

[dtoff]

while the ram disc is much faster then the normal hard drive or a scsi hard drive but how much of the seti's work is hard drive dependent??? running a normal application off a ram disc will really speed it up but using a ram disc for seti is like running it off of a 15000 rpm hard scsi hard drive (ram disc is faster then that) so my point is that using seti a program that only really uses processer power on a ram disc should not change the speed fo seti's crunching power.....

 

[ShotgunSi]

No real results yet. I want to get at least 5 workunits on the Ramdisk then 5 results on the hard drive first, then I'll post them

 

[ElFenix]

i tried it. not much help, i think. maybe (a big maye) a couple of mnutes a unit. any crash will kill any advantage gained.