On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger <li...@xunil.at> wrote: > > Greets, gentoo-users, > > as I ordered myself an upgrade from 4 to 8 gigs of RAM for my main > workstation, just because it's rather cheap now and I have good use for > the "old" 4 gigs I wonder what to do with those shiny new additional 4 gigs. > > OK, linux uses it for IO-caching, yep ... > > I have some ram-disk already for compiling stuff (portage-stuff) and I > can think of increasing app-caches like operas own ram-cache to make use > of the memory. > > I will give my virtual machines more RAM to improve their performance, > yes, this is maybe the main reason for me to upgrade RAM. > > But are there any other things I might forget? > > Are there any creative non-ricer ways to really make use of it? > > I would like to hear your opinion on this, I am quite sure the > gentoo-community knows one trick or the other ;-) > > Thanks a lot, Stefan > >
Non-ricer? Well... this sorta breaks that category. There's a rather handy tool[1] already in the stage3, I've used it alongside bootchart to force-load everything needed into ram during boot, before it's needed, so execution gets held up by i/o just a little less. Actually shaved a few seconds off of my desktop's bootup once upon a time (3.0 GHz core 2 duo on 4GB of ram, which had excessive eyecandy while remaining fairly lightweight). The second use I put it through, and this one just a little more long-term useful, was preloading my wm, most of my home directory (primarily all the config files), aterm, firefox, a few other common tools I use, and the libraries they were using on my system while logging in. All of my applications were starting in no time at all. The catch... I took the brute force approach, rather than using an add-on tool to automagically choose what to prefetch for me. There are also setting in the bootscripts that, if you're not already using them, will make use of at least a little, using tmpfs here and there, and also just putting /tmp and /var/tmp onto tmpfs (outside of building things like open office, this tends to work well). Oh, and if you really do want to use up all that ram.... build openoffice in tmpfs... if it could use all 8GB for files only, it might actually work out, I know it kills off when you only have part of 4GB to feed it. [1] artifice ~ # busybox readahead BusyBox v1.14.2 (2009-10-13 06:37:22) multi-call binary Usage: readahead [FILE]... Preload FILE(s) in RAM cache so that subsequent reads for thosefiles do not block on disk I/O -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
