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

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!