All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
OS on RAM vs SSD
MY understanding is that RAM I/O blows away even the fastest SSDs out there. Because of nature of Lowenbox where most people run non-resource intensive services and because of its small size wouldn't it actually be faster to load the whole System on memory and periodically write files on HD (a la puppylinux), over using SSD?
I know this is probably not a use case for 80% of people (mostly because their system is bigger than the memory available).
Can anyone with the right hardware compare speed (SSD vs DDR3 I/O using dd)?
I think puppy linux is the only OS that loads from ram, Ubuntu (and most others ) can be configured with some trouble. And live CD also loads part of the OS to memory.
Can anyone with the right hardware test it out?
Just for fun.
Comments
Fastest SSD (OCZ Z) = 1400 MBps
DDR3-2500 = 20,000 MBps
RAM based anything will for now blow away any disk of any sort, even SSD. Problem is drive speed along with interconnect to the drives. RAM sits right upside the CPU and has the fastest bus in every computer designed so far (that I know of).
Been dying to have drives that were RAM stick based with a much faster transport fabric. iRAM did this and the bottleneck there was the SATA channel. Few other companies that have done this.
You have to be ready to expect when something happens to RAM that your entire world goes bang. Likelihood in shared environment I expect to be greater.
I ran RAM-only based systems for years. Everything that was the OS and all the runtime software resided 100% in RAM. It has it's risks and needs regulated, but doable.
You could build your own distro and make it all RAM residing.
A tiny distro will tend to be RAM based. Believe Puppy does basically that (been years since I used Puppy). Long time with this approach on initial load/reboot though.
I've always wondered what I can do to my linux distro to use more RAM and speed up the OS. So far, the only program I found was "preload" and I haven't seen a noticeable difference
The problem with the situation is -> RAM does not possess persistence. Once there is a power off you loose everything on RAM. So from time to time it is mandatory to sync your RAM and Disks so that you do not loose state of your applications.
Caching is done on LINUX and usually it load many important portion of OS and Applications into RAM for the same purpose only.
There are databases like Redis and MongoDB that take advantage of the same and are very good but there is a lot of conflict because of there 100% not following the essentials of ACID properties, There may be a time in which they may loose data they have on RAM which has not yet been written on disk too, Thus loosing important transactions.
I think rather than trying to load the OS completely on RAM you should always try to use RAM as a caching mechanism. This provides you the best of what actually RAM is best at.
There are definitely few OS there that load them entirely on RAM, specifically those that are for recovery and run completely from a CD rom. But due to a fact that we need to have the data we have processed today later and the state of OS and applications should be provided as such when the machines turn on next time disks that have permanent storage are being used.
That is why SSD take over RAM and HDD these days usually.
Also to answer your original question- Yes RAM is exceptionally faster than SSD and if something is using RAM only than it is damn fast.