On Dec 10, 2005, at 7:29 AM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
"Generally a bad idea -- but a few people claim that it works.
In theory, the OS can do a much better job of managing the
left-over RAM than the RAM disk software. And in our tests,
RAM disks don't help, they slow things down."
Well it was only an idea :) My thought was directed more at the fact
that PS can only ever use a couple of Gb of memory (2Gb on Windows
and 3Gb on Mac, I think). So if you used a large ramdisk for PS swap
space, it means PS would effectively have access to a lot more memory
without having to wait for disk access. With that much memory it
probably wouldn't be necessary to put the OS swap file in as well.
And, while I can't speak with great knowledge regarding Macs (since
they
may manage / use memory differently than Win boxes) 13GB (16GB
minus 2GB
for PS minus 1GB for OS) may be somewhat marginal for swap space and a
scratch disk, especially if you're working with large files.
I was doing some pretty heavy-lifting with PS earlier today. I had a
file open that was just short of 1Gb in size, and after making some
adjustments I extracted several layers into separate files (about
200Mb each). Scratch usage peaked at about 8.5Gb.
I'd also be
concerned about what might happen if both the swap file and the
scratch
disk were writing to the RAM disk at the same time.
It'd behave no differently to a physical hard drive, only about 1,000
times faster.
- Dave
