Operating Systems in Memory (I Wonder...)

[David Lloyd]

Mark,

> What you're proposing is to take all the money that you -could- spend
> on RAM and instead spend it on a RAM-based filesystem device, which
> costs more per gigabyte, and which will deliver measurably inferior
> results in any comparison with a kernel-based page cache.

That was a suggestion made by Michael Haarsma.

> Just buy RAM.  Cheaper, better, less mucking around.

That was the beginning of the conversation. I doubt I'll use more than 
2Gb or RAM (programs and datasets) but I could have at least 4Gb...and 
my readonly file systems are less than 2Gb.

Consequently, I'm not sure we actually disagree with each other. I am 
saying, though, that I expect 4Gb of RAM will see me with at least 
1-1.5Gb of RAM spare. All the time...

In my case placing some of my hard disk storage (or a copy of it) into 
RAM might make sense.

DSL