SliTaz Forum

ms

Member

Registered: 2011-04-01

Posts: 90

Running from memory vs hard drive

Maybe this is a naive question, but I'm curious. The LiveUSB/CD version of Slitaz runs by default off the computer's memory. Where as the hard drive install does not do that, although you can force it do so by using the loram option (?).

What is the rationale behind forcing the hard drive install to run off the disk vs RAM? Considering most systems these days have plenty of memory (north of 1GB), memory consumption should definitely not be an issue, especially considering Slitaz's extremely low resource footprint (with a dozen applications running, my memory usage rarely crosses 200MB).

The difference in performance between the two modes is tremendous, the system operates at a lightening fast speed when running off the RAM, vs when off the disk, it is pretty ordinary. This is especially true for older systems that still have plenty of memory, but not the fastest processors (my 6 yr old laptop for example, is running on an Intel Core Solo but has 2 GB RAM).

Trixar_za

Administrator

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 1,506

Re: Running from memory vs hard drive

My system at the moment uses about 2.5GB of storage and that's not even running processes. If you compile a lot, then having it run out of RAM is a really bad idea. It's the same for other very resource intensive processes like games or graphic design.

compostela

Member

Registered: 2011-06-27

Posts: 44

Re: Running from memory vs hard drive

This makes me very confused. I thought that even the hard disk installation runs from RAM. As a matter of fact if you run the "free" command and after that create a big file, when you run the free command again you will see that your used memory has increase showing the new file size in the memory count.

Besides, the speed of the system compare with other distros make you believe that you are not seeking the disk much. At least it feels this way.

Questions:

1)  What is actually happen when you do a hd instalation?

2)  what really happens when you do something like "seq 1 1000 > file". Does the file gets written

right away to disk? I also have a Puppy Linux partition with a HD installation, everything seems in RAM but when you shutdown, it ask you if you want to save the changes you have done to disk.

I don't want that.

3) How can I have the OS in RAM and at the same time when I write something to disk will do it immediately when working with Slitaz? Is that the way it actually works? ram disk.....?

Hate to sound so ignorant but I haven't found this information in the Documentation or in the Forum. I ask because it seems to me that writing at the end is dangerous, power failure, etc, could erase your valuable data.

Thanks