Sunday, February 28, 2010

Ramdrive and Memory FS

Modern file systems automatically cache files in memory. Anyway, sometime is useful to work with a memory file system where you pre-load all the data.

On Unix this is typically realized mounting a memory file system:
 mount_mfs -s 20m swap /work
On Windows (XP/Vista/7), I found very useful to use this software Ramdisk from dataram, which creates a normal disk but in ram.

1 comment:

  1. Just a minor thought: using some RAM as a filesystem, the I/O disk caching at OS level is in some way impacted. Moreover, if that portion of the RAM is seen as a filesystem, the disk caching mechanism is going to cache it a second time. So it should be fine for small RAM disk sizes with a lot of memory available, but for big amount of data, the VM paging is probably going to limit the benefits of having data in RAM. I was looking for some similar solution to store posting lists in memory...

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