View Single Post
Old 09-24-2015, 05:05 PM   #26444
DMcCunney
New York Editor
DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
DMcCunney's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,384
Karma: 16540415
Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami View Post
Why on earth would you do this? The only reason I can think about is to prevent others from looking into the profile, assuming you store it into an archive that has a password. I think Firefox won't be much faster running from a RAM-drive than when running from an SSD. I wouldn't even be surprised if Firefox just reads and caches its profile in RAM on its own.
Why do it? It's quicker, and it was fun to implement. (I am not concerned about others seeing the content of the profile. The only way anyone could get to information on the desktop machine is to sit down in front of it, and if they can do that, I've got much bigger problems than PC security. Loading from a zip file was simply faster than a block copy from HD.)

I originally did something like this on my old desktop. That was a dual core 32bit machine dual booting WinXP and Ubuntu, with 4GB RAM. For technical reasons, 32 bit Windows can't see/use more than about 3.2GB RAM, so I had RAM that was unused. I found a freeware ramdisk driver that could see and use that extra memory, and had a 768MB ramdisk seen as Z:

The first step was putting the browser cache there. Next step was putting the profile there. Last step was running the browser itself from the ramdisk.

At the highest level of development, I could use Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Thunderbird that way, and since I run production and beta builds of Firefox, specify which was run from the ramdisk.

On the new desktop, I boot and run Win7 Pro and Ubuntu from SSD. A quick test showed there was no real benefit to running Firefox itself from the ramdisk: speed of loading and invocation from SSD was about as fast as it would be from the ramdisk. There was still a benefit to putting cache and profile on the ramdisk.

A secondary benefit was reducing writes to the SSD. To the extent convenient, things here are set up do that the SSD is primarily read-only, and actual variable data is written to and lives on the HD.

Quote:
The only thing I'd use RAM-drives for are thousands and thousands of small temporary files that don't need to be saved. Maybe I should try and set up one for Calibre's Edit Book functionality, as it spits out a lot of small files when opening a book.
That's a valid usage. I started using ramdisks in the MSDOS days. My original PC had an addon card with a meg of additional memory. 512KB of that was allocated to a ramdisk, various frequently used things were copied there on boot, and the ramdisk was first in the %PATH%. It was also set as the place to create temp files for things that could be told where to make them, like PKZip. Sped things up a treat.
______
Dennis
DMcCunney is offline   Reply With Quote