David W. Fenton wrote >I'd be interested to know if under OS X you guys were stikll finding >RAM disks helpful with pre-2006 Finale. We had a discussion of this a >while back and I can't remember what was concluded. I'd have thought >that OS X's modern industrial-strength virtual memory management >would have made that obsolete, but I seem to remember that some of >you were reporting that it still helped (which implies substantial >inefficiency somewhere in the OS X disk caching subsystems). I'd >think that this move of what used to be in temp files to RAM would >finally obsolete the use of RAM disks as a performance enhancer (and >make it into a performance drag).
In my early days as a programmer, when IBM re-invented paging and called it virtul memory, it was generally understood that simplistic replacement algorithms, like Least Recently Used, could produce very poor performance in some circumstances e.g. inverting a matrix that is slightly bigger than main memory. With overlays, the programmer could anticipate data requirements and overlap fetches with computation. Even with more sophisticated control algorithms, it would not surprise me if paging sometimes hit a pathological condition.
-- Ken Moore Musician and engineer _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
