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

Re:However

[operagost]

They borrow some of the system's RAM to use. As such using it as swap is dumb, since it is just system RAM.

Quoted for truth. How did this make it onto the front page? It's a totally absurd proposition.

Re:Probably a good idea, provided you have PCIe

[Anonymous Freak]

Interesting that you work for Seagate, but don't know that the ES.2 achieves over 100 MB/s on the outer edge, and over 50 MB/s on the inner. (According to StorageReview, anyway.)