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Anyone else using Ramdisk in Windows 7?
MilesAhead:
If they improved swap file that's fine but by the very nature of file systems I would tend to guess the partition swap is a lot closer to the low level calculations that file systems use to manage the files. Therefore it's awfully likely there's another layer on top of that for the file system that's not there for the partition management.
-MilesAhead (September 02, 2011, 01:45 PM)
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Actually, swap in Linux is a lot more accessible and tweakable than it is in Windows. And better documented. If you have multiple swap spaces you can prioritize which gets used first. You can temporarily or permanently tweak what set of conditions triggers a swap ("swappiness"). You can also very easily enable or completely disable swap from the command line. I tend to do that on machines with a lot of RAM. I'll enable swap only if I'm doing something that needs it. Then I'll disable it afterwards.
Good two part article on it here. Part-1 gives the main details. Part-2 gets into tweaking.
You can also temporarily or permanently swap to either a swap partition - or a swap file on a regular partition. That comes in handy if you ever discover you didn't create a big enough swap partition for your requirements. A swap file fixes the problem very nicely until you around to resizing some partitions (also easy to do in Linux) to give you a bigger space if you prefer to keep swap on its own partition.
Yessir! Swap is a whole 'nother beast on Linux. :Thmbsup:
-40hz (September 02, 2011, 02:23 PM)
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I know. See my previous posts esp. the one with "round robin" in the text.
It's almost unbelievable Windows has done nothing in all these years regarding swap.
Maybe those guys from DEC quit and nobody else at Redmond has the talent.
I wonder if anyone has info on Windows 7 prefetch vs. swap? I have a feeling it does stuff like swap stuff out so it can prefetch stuff on the preferred list in. It would be interesting to know if setting page file max would have any effect. It might be more conservative if it knew there was a limit other than free disk space? Probably no way to know for sure.
But those type of tweaks was what made Linux an adventure. What killed it for me was the editors. The only thing Windows-ee was Kylix ide editor. It just got distracting trying to remember how to navigate in Emacs. And the help was weird. Kind of needs total immersion to really do it well. I always had the Windows partition crutch. Pretty much had to as some devices I had to initialize with Windows. Then once warm I could boot Linux and use 'em. :)
Even today if I ask about a Linux editor that feels like a Windows editor I get the same suggestions I tried then. Word processors when I want a text editor. The ones I found with Windows type hotkeys tended to be configured in lisp or python. Just kept me from thinking about what I was typing because I had to think how to type what I was typing.
But it was fun.
40hz:
It's almost unbelievable Windows has done nothing in all these years regarding swap.
-MilesAhead (September 02, 2011, 02:28 PM)
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Oh...I wouldn't be surprised if they did. They're probably just not sharing it.
In some respects I can understand why. In a well designed system, the system itself should take care of that without the user needing to get involved. And considering the number of Windows users who aren't "technical" (one of the drawbacks of being The Desktop of the Masses), maybe it's better that it's been dumbed-down at the user level.
And in all fairness, you can either view the ability to screw around with swap as a feature of Linux. Or proof positive that it wasn't implemented properly to begin with - hence the need for its tweakability.
Once again it's: [glass half empty | glass half full] depending on who's doing the talking. 8)
Lashiec:
With systems these days having so much memory any user will struggle to find a way to actually take advantage of it, I don't see the point in having Microsoft wasting their time improving the "tweakability" of the swap file, frankly. And Windows does an excellent job managing the swap with the default settings, or at least that's my experience.
I guess having the perfect swap setup is quickly approaching the snake oil status, pretty much like all the optimization tricks that no longer bring quantifiable benefits today. Unless you're OCD about it *ahem*
40hz:
I guess having the perfect swap setup is quickly approaching the snake oil status, pretty much like all the optimization tricks that no longer bring quantifiable benefits today.
-Lashiec (September 04, 2011, 10:19 AM)
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Well said! And likely very true too. :Thmbsup:
MilesAhead:
Ram disk is so Win98 anyway.
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