On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 7:17 PM Jim Hall <jh...@freedos.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 5:57 PM dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > >[..] > > I haven't read through the entire thread, but I am curious about why > > the person whose email request was referenced *wanted* a RAMdrive for > > DOS targer than 8GB. > >[..] > > With a big enough RAMdrive, you could create it on startup and copy > > *everything* you used to it and run entirely off the RAMdrive. I > > could do something like that with the Win64 RAMdrive. You can define > > an image file to be loaded to it after it is instantiated, and I could > > theoretically load everything I use to it, but the benefits don't > > justify the effort. > > It's an interesting technical achievement, to be sure. So on that end, > I think it's cool. But I'm not convinced an 8 GB RAM drive for DOS is > the best way to use that memory.
I concur > + pros: When the system boots up, you can copy all of DOS into the RAM > drive, and everything will run faster after that. > > - cons: The initial copy is slow because you're copying everything. > And changes in the RAM drive aren't preserved when you reboot. I dealt with that setting up Firefox to use a profile on the RAMdrive. It proved to be *much* faster to keep the profile in a Zip archive on HD, which was extracted to the RAMdrive using a cmmand line unzip in my Windows startup process, onstead of using copy operations on scads of files. Capturing and preserving changes was a similar issue. Ordinarily, Firefox execution was wrtpped in a script, and exiting Firefox normally triggered a shutdown step that zipped the entire RAMdrive profile back to a Zip archive to preserve changes in that session. Win7 (and 10) Pro had access to Group Policy Manager, Using GPM, I could listen for and trap shutdown/reboot event signals, and run the script that zipped the Firefox profile back to the Zip archive if those events occurred. And my script preserved 5 days worth of Zip files. If I made an error that trashed the current file, I could unzip an older copy instead. At most, I lost a day' s work. Once I got it properly set up, it Just Worked, and it was fun setting it up, but I'm just as happy to not need to do it now. Hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper, and SSDs are close to making HDs obsolete. > RAM drives make sense on DOS for cached files or a temporary area ... > but does DOS need an 8 GB temp area? Does it need a *4GB* area? I'd still love to know what the requester's use case was. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
