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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?"
Is your adapter an AGP or PCI-Express card? Because PCI-Express has fast lanes both ways, and AGP is not so fast in writing back. That could explain a part of the performance problems.
I'm assuming your ancient system uses an AGP interface for graphics, which has a very fast download rate, but very poor upload. The maximum performance of AGP uploading data from the card memory to the rest of the machine is pretty slow (less than 100MB/sec, IIRC), and it will vary depending on the implementation. This is probably the reason you got such slow benches.
PCIe will likely give you performance more in-line with main memory (most implementations now are hitting 1-2 GB/s).
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How much RAM is in your video card? 64 megabytes? 128? If it's an older machine, probably much less than that. Assuming you have less than a gigabyte of main RAM in your system it's probably much more worthwhile to drop a few dollars on expanding that and running whatever RAM disk you need in there.
Err... Which hdparm timings are you looking at?
One of the biggest advantages of using VRAM for disks is the nearly 0 seek latency.
As a result even if the card is slower than disk on read you are still likely to have an overall performance gain.
In addition to that there is a number of architectural vagaries to consider. AGP is asymmetric. Reading is considerably slower than writing (can't find anywhere by how much. Damn...).
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Bull... Even onboard video adaptors are connected to via a bus and that bus will be either ISA, VESA Local Bus, PCI, AGP or PCIe, depending on the age of the machine.
Bzzt - wrong.
Even high-end systems use swap space, because it allows for swapping out parts of memory that isn't called, freeing up that memory for things like disk cache, which does have a positive effect.
Doing "free" on a system here, I see that there's 886492 kB of free memory, of which 879896 kB is used for disk cache. 72892 kB is swapped to disk, and if there were no swap, the disk cache would have been that much smaller. Even if I had umpteen gigabytes of RAM free, that still would be 70 MB of extra cache by using a swap partition. That's a Good Thing.
What's a Bad Thing is when swap is used because you run low on memory -- then you get trashing and a seriously slow system. But on a healthy system with enough free memory, where the kernel can swap out pages not because it has to, but because it makes sense, using swap is a Good Thing.
Doesn't built-in video generally share the system RAM?
Not always. For example, I have a machine that has 32MB of video RAM, and can use additional system RAM if necessary.
This sort of brings up another issue he might be happening. A lot of on board video cards use system memory to function properly. If the swap space is actually in system memory, the extra transfer overhear of going up the bus to the controller that then send it back to the memory that is actually sending the stuff to the video ram.. Well, you see what I mean. The extra few steps could be enough latency per read write operation to slow the thing down compared to a direct access method that would be present with an IDE connection as well as video memory built on to the video car itself.
I think the differences might be as noticeable as turning DMA (direct memory access) on and off. And yes, you can see a big bit of difference. It was actually worth me buying new drives just to have DMA access when it first started becoming available. I remember earlier versions of windows 98 and (95 I think), that wouldn't turn it on by default. After making sure the drives supported it and enabling it, people would almost think they had a new computer. There was that much of a difference in performance.
Built in is relevant since nearly all built in adapters do not have their own RAM. They borrow some of the system's RAM to use. As such using it as swap is dumb, since it is just system RAM. A better solution is to turn down the amount of RAM the onboard card gets to reserve (usually the BIOS can control this). Separate graphics adapters almost always include their own RAM, and as such could potentially be useful.
It was main memory, but back then we had the XMS/EMS hack instead of flat memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_Memory_Specification#Expansion_boardsEscher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Like this one: http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312
It works wonderfully for Windows swap file! (and better still for Photoshop/Premiere swapfile) It is limited to 4GB (draws power from the PCI bus) and it is driver-less. (works with ANY PC motherboard supported OS)
It connects to the PC using a SATA1 connection (but a continuous 1.5 Gb/s is still better than most HDDs) and it uses 4x 1024MB DDR1 RAM Modules.
There is a future 8GB DDR2 SATA2 3.0 Gb/s model (allegedly) coming out soon that fits in a 5.25" drive bay:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/10116 (please, oh please, don't be vaporware)
Might be faster if the driver knew about DMA. Your harddrive, even thought it is slow, has DMA. So when you want to swap out pages you can set it and forget it. You're not really in any hurry to swap out, only to swap in. So it seems while a harddrive lets the CPU do other work while it ways for the pages to be copied, the MTD slram driver does not.
There isn't enough memory on a videocard to really make it worth doing the right way either. Mine only has 256M which is not that big compared to systems that have 1G to 2G of system RAM and 1-4G of swap.
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