Creating a ramdisk

[Kevin Buettner]

On Mar 1, 10:06pm, The Wolf wrote:

> Rick Rosinski wrote:
>
> > I am running Seti@home and it works great.  I have find out,
> > however, that it does alot reading from the hard drive.  I want to
> > take the extra stress off of the hard drive, and put everything
> > about seti@home into a RAM disk.  I have no idea on how to create
> > a ram disk.  I want to create a ram disk, mount it as a directory
> > and treat it like any other directory in the file system.  Can
> > somebody help me out?
>
> I do not think this will work.
> Seti downloads the data to be processed
> to your hard drive.  And then it processes
> it.  So if you remove your drive and
> use ramdisk this probably will not work.

It'd work if you had enough memory and were able to create a large
enough RAM disk for Seti to work in.  But I think it's more effective
to just get a pile of memory and let linux do its normal file caching. 
(I have 512 MB on one of my machines.  There are times when I'll do a
recursive diff of two large source trees.  It'll churn away for a
while and when it finishes, I'll sometimes see that I forgot to use a
particular diff option and need to redo it.  The second time that I
run the diff is really amazing because the diff finishes almost
immediately due to the files being cached in memory.)

In response to Rick's original request...  To learn about RAM disks,
look in Documentation/ramdisk.txt in the kernel sources.  There is
also some information about RAM disks in the Multi-Disk-HOWTO, and the
Loopback-Root-FS mini-HOWTO.  (grep is a wonderful tool.)

Kevin