Is Video RAM a Good Swap Device?

sean4u writes "I use a 'lucky' (inexplicably still working) headless desktop PC to serve pages for a low-volume e-commerce site. I came across a gentoo-wiki.com page and this linuxnews.pl page that suggested the interesting possibility of using the Video RAM of the built-in video adapter as a swap device or RAM disk. The instructions worked a treat, but I'm curious as to how good a substitute this can be for swap space on disk. In my (amateurish) test, hdparm -t tells me the Video RAM block device is 3 times slower than the aging disk I currently use. If you've used this technique, what performance do you get? Is the poor performance report from hdparm a feature of the hardware, or the Memory Technology Device driver? What do you use to measure swap performance?"

Comments

yeah, I know it means no screen

[jollyreaper]

I know headless means that the system doesn't have a screen but I still get this idea of a box strapped to a horse, chasing down Ichabod Crane.

Re:yeah, I know it means no screen

[curmudgeous]

...chasing down Ichabaud Crane.

There, fixed that for you.

I'd Say...Neither

[camperdave]

Is your adapter an AGP or PCI-Express card?

using the Video RAM of the built-in video adapter as a swap device

The adapter in question is built into the motherboard.

Re:As far as swap devices go, I prefer

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear troll,

You are not very good at this. People on slashdot are more or less immune to trolls that use racial slurs. In troll 101, you should have at least learned to disparage an OS or programming language if you really want to rile people up. This is a good troll, that is also topical:

"Linux is not a very good OS to use for swapping to the video card. It's video bus support is hopelessly dated and slow, though you can use the experimental driver if you patch the kernel."

That simple statement will get you far more responses, and perhaps even get modded up by some clueless folks with mod points. Then you can masturbate feverishly until the next time someone tries to cross your bridge.

Works even better with really old video cards

[Waffle Iron]

Old-fashioned dual-ported VRAM is an excellent solution for an e-commerce site. You can be loading customer transactions and one-click purchases from the VRAMs' random-access ports while you're simultaneously serving web pages from the serial-access ports. Your performance will double!

Now if you want truly blazing speed, you can track down some of that dual-ported static RAM that came in 40-pin DIPs. Full random access on both ports would let you serve dynamic web pages while you run customer transactions, all with zero wait states on the ISA bus!

Ha!

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

And to think people laughed at me when I bought a shiny new 1GB video card!