apparently off-base
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| gus3 Jul 08, 2007 8:48 PM EDT |
Reading the comments, it looks like his understanding of what Vista is doing is flawed. Vista's "ReadyBoost" is copying files to the flash drive for caching purposes, not using it as a paging file extension. I submitted the following comment: -- Bad for flash, agreed, and dangerous for swap safety (unplugging while active?). However, pre-emptive caching is not necessarily available only with flash. I have a shell script that runs when I log in to Gnome, containing the line: ( cd /usr/lib ; find firefox* openoffice.org2.0/program -type f -name *.so ) | nice xargs cat > /dev/null & This finds all regular files and reads them, effectively loading their contents into file cache. This speeds up the launch of Firefox and OpenOffice.org noticeably. You can substitute your own files/directories. Note: this really works only if you don't normally use swap during regular system usage. I have 768M, so I want to use filesystem cache. On a 256M system, it probably won't work as well for lots of file data. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 08, 2007 10:05 PM EDT |
What really has me puzzled is why ReadyBoost was created in the first place. The HDD is a much safer and faster way to cache this stuff to. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft has botched their virtual memory manager. Either to make it work bad in non-Ultimate version of Vista or to keep Vista low, since it's already eating 10-20 Gb. |
| michaelcole Jul 08, 2007 10:21 PM EDT |
I find this to be a little weird, In the first place is not swap not meant to be an extension of the memory and as fast as possible . I can not see how a Flash Disk on USB be really fast enough, I have some flash Disks and they are all slow to write, not bad on read but would not really work well enough for a Swap Drive. I always on my computers Double the Size of the Swap than the Memory Expected to be added to the System. So for my Laptop which initially had 512 MB i created a 2GB Swap Drive as I knew in the future i would increase the Memory. As a paging file extension it may help but once again I have enough devices now hanging of my USB ports, I really don't want the computer using this space. I don't know about the real speed of USB vs the theory.but I now have keyboard, mouse, memory card devices, bluetooth, printers, scanner, game pad, and other assorted items. They have to share the Max speed so on a workstation I would be better to take some of my HD and assign this to that purpose. Taking this to a Linux handheld device or other embed technology device using Linux I could see an advantage. As these devices can have limited memory and expansion can always help. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 08, 2007 10:40 PM EDT |
The only real speedup I can imagine from this is when the HDD is really busy. A HDD can only do one thing at a time. Regulating swap to a different device might speed up the other work the HDD is doing. But that's quite old and well known, and faster with a second hard drive. If you happen to have two hard drives (even if the second one is an old, small one) try putting swap on the 2nd drive instead of the drive that holds / and/or /home. You should see a speed-up if your machine uses swap (mine doesn't. 1 Gb RAM is plenty for Debian/etch). |
| gus3 Jul 08, 2007 11:32 PM EDT |
Swap/paging becomes even faster if you can put it on the secondary controller (hdc or hdd). The contention ends at the PCI bus. However, be careful that you don't mix fast (100/133 MHz) and slow (33 MHz) devices on the IDE cable. The speed on the cable matches the slowest device, so swapping could be slowed down by a CD-ROM drive on the same cable, even if the CD is idle. As for grabbing file data via USB 2.0, the interface is capable of 40 megs/second, and some flash drives are approaching 30 megs/second. If you're talking about a laptop with some older hardware, and no memory expansion is available (or possible due to hardware design), a flash drive could help things along considerably. No track-to-track seek time, no spinning platters, and a very low power drain. It could be a win for Vista... but how sad is it that Vista is so bulky that its users need to consider this? |
| nalf38 Jul 09, 2007 1:29 PM EDT |
"when the HDD is really busy." I spent a few days with Vista on my brand new Lenovo laptop with 2GB ram, and I figured that eventually...eventually...I said, *eventually* the hard drive would stop spinning. I wouldn't be surprised if hard drive failures skyrocket a few years from now. And if the HD is spinning constantly, that can't be doing any favors for the laptop battery. I finally gave up and put in a Sabayon Linux live DVD; no special reason for Sabayon---it's just the first live DVD in my house that I could find. I think you hit the nail right on the head, Sander. I think they're recommending flash because you can't add a second hard drive to your laptop. |
| nalf38 Jul 09, 2007 1:35 PM EDT |
OK, slightly OT, but only slightly. I'll more than likely be wiping Vista off my machine and installing some Linux distro. Suggestions? I've always been a gentoo user, but it's fairly easy (in my opinion) to put Gentoo on desktops...I don't really need to configure Hibernate/Sleep/Suspend, CPU frequency scaling, wireless, etc. etc. etc. Sabayon actually did a good job of all of that, plus it has Compiz/Beryl/whatever-you-call-it-now out of the box. Is Ubuntu all it's cracked up to be? |
| jdixon Jul 09, 2007 1:42 PM EDT |
> Is Ubuntu all it's cracked up to be? No, but from what I've been able to see, it's a good Debian derivative. To be fair, no distribution could live up to the Ubuntu hype. |
| number6x Jul 09, 2007 1:52 PM EDT |
I found the slackware derivative Zenwalk works well on my t42 thinkpad. Vector Linux also worked well. I was able to setup hibernate/suspend on zenwalk using steps found in the zenwalk or slackware forums. Dream Linux and mint Linux are also nice debian based distros. I just ran their live cd's but did not install. All of these have live cd's so you can try them on your hardware before installing |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 09, 2007 2:23 PM EDT |
Quoting:Is Ubuntu all it's cracked up to be? In terms of distro quality and newbie-friendlyness it's pretty good but not the best. Ubuntu's biggest feature is a very large and newbie-friendly community in the forums. |
| moopst Jul 09, 2007 7:27 PM EDT |
I just upgraded my Toshiba laptop from ZenWalk 4.2 to Slackware 12. All I needed to do was the usual manual edit to xorg.conf to get the 1280x800 resolution working and the scroll mouse (ZenWalk had the scroll mouse working). Wireless needs to be reconfigured using either ipw3945 or ndiswrapper but that was the case with each ZenWalk upgrade I've done so far. And I may consider compiling a custom kernel though the default kernel is working fine. |
| gus3 Jul 10, 2007 12:02 AM EDT |
--"upgraded" from ZenWalk 4.2 to Slackware 12.-- Somehow, I think Linux is the only kernel for which such a statement makes sense. nalf38: Do whatever you think you'll be comfortable with. Or, if you're in an adventurous mood, "cast off the bowlines" and try something different. Make it a learning experience. You can always fall back to something more comfortable later. If you set up /home as a separate partition, you'll be able to isolate it from any future system conversions (like an "upgrade" from ZenWalk 4.2 to Slackware 12). And whatever you do, as Patrick Volkerding likes to say, "have a lot of fun!" |
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