On 05/26/2012 01:33 PM, Clint Byrum wrote: > On laptops and other power sensitive devices, this is pretty critical. > > Hypothetical: I have 2GB of RAM, and I want to watch a 50MB video file > on a connection that will take, say, 10 minutes to cache the whole thing > (and its a 10 minute video). > > With a regular filesystem hosting /tmp, Every 30 seconds I will wake up > the hard disk, and write data to it. I doubt most spinning disks will > go to sleep in < 30 seconds, so this is more than 10 minutes solid of > hard disk spinning. > > With tmpfs, there is no memory pressure, so my disk never even spins up > to write anything to it. If I do run into memory pressure, yes, I need > to use swap at that point. But at that point I've got a lot more than > just the disk draining power. >
Now, another hypothetical. Same machine but with 1 GB of RAM (please, don't tell me that's unusual...), a 600 MB video file, with a video that is 2 hours long. You have Firefox started (to watch the video), and many pluggins and many tabs open, and it's taking 600 MB of RAM (that's nothing really unusual, unfortunately). After a while, your HDD starts spinning like hell, because it's swapping... Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4fc0ee82.6030...@debian.org
