[GRLUG] swap benchmarking

[Michael Mol]

On 2/19/07, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> For us ordinary folks,  cost is always
> a consideration of course.  For swapping,
> flash has no performance advantages,  and
> but for cost,  one would go directly to more
> RAM.   I'd sure rather have a machine
> with 64 GB of RAM than 64 GB of flash,
> but do appreciate the roof over my head.
> Especially in this weather....  ;-)
>
> Flash starts to address the affordability
> issue,  but would still leave most people
>  between a rock and a hard place.  What
> seems most appealing just now is
> putting much of the OS in flash for
> faster boot up.  This would seem to apply
> mostly to laptops,  where one wants to
> keep the machine off as much as possible
> in the interest of battery life. Otherwise,  for
> about $80 now,  one can get 1GB of decent
> ( Crucial )  RAM.  See newegg.com.
> It seems to come down to whether one
> has an extreme performance requirement.
>
> It's hard to see that many people would
> benefit from a flash,  although servers
> might if one cached frequently used
> applications in flash that didn't fit in
> to swap space.  But it looks like solid
> state drive "solutions" are still pretty
> pricey for ordinary use.

I primarily work with low incremental budgets and old PC hardware.
Being able to replace a gig of swap on my main drive with
lower-latency flash sounds like a good deal to me, even if  the
throughput is lower than adding more RAM, as flash as a lower
incremental cost.  It's something I can actually try when I only have
a spare budget of $10-20 per week.

I also see it benefiting older hardware where the RAM has been maxed
out, or where the necessary RAM is no longer readily available.  If
the system doesn't have USB2, one can add a $15 USB2 PCI expansion
card.

-- 
:wq