Experiment - Ram Drive + F@H

Back a few months ago, my girlfriend kept telling me my laptop made a clicking sound at night when I was at work. I tried shutting down F@H for a night, and she no longer heard the noise.

I figured out it was the hard drive spinning up every so often for work units.
I tired to think of a way to keep the hard drive spun down and still run F@H.

Create a RAM hard drive. Seems Simple .. and it was...

Software --> Dataram's RamDiskVE (http://www.dataram.com/products-and-services/ramdisk)
(Software is free for Ram Drives under 4GB in size)

Image 1) I launched the application and created a Drive 500 MB in size.


Image 2) I set the application to save the drive contents on closure of the app and to restore from the same image on the start.
(There is an option to save at a specified interval but that kinda defeats the RAMDrive function)
-- ( A second option would be to create a .bat file to backup and a second .bat file to load the drive on a reboot if you so desired)


Image 3) You can see my 500MB drive in Explorer.


I then moved my two F@H folders ( 2 x Uni-processor Client) to the Ram Drive and fired them up ....

I also did the same thing on my Main System ( 1 x GPU & 1 Uni-processor Client) to help test this setup.

Now, some results

Project : 4749 -- Core : GPU2 ATI Dev
Frames : 100 -- Credit : 548

-- Main -- (Pre-Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 2mn 19s - 3406.27 ppd

-- Main -- (On Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 2mn 14s - 3533.37 ppd

Project : 2446
Core : Gromacs
Frames : 100
Credit : 2435

-- Main -- (Pre-Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 1h 01mn 36s - 569.22 ppd

-- Main -- (On Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 55mn 36s - 630.65 ppd

Project : 0000 -- Core : Gromacs
Frames : 100 -- Credit : 100

-- Laptop -- (Pre Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 2mn 26s - 591.78 ppd

-- Laptop -- (Pre Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 2mn 33s - 564.71 ppd

-- Laptop -- (On Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 2mn 33s - 564.71 ppd

-- Laptop -- (On Ram Drive)

Cur. Time / Frame : 2mn 34s - 561.04 ppd

Conclusion:
I did notice a small increase in PPD from my Main system.
I did notice a small decrease in PPD from my Laptop.
Since the Laptop CPU usage is at 100%, i think the few ppd loss is from the cpu usage needed for the Ram Drive, while my Main system has about 15% cpu free.

I can't say weather this will increase your ppd or not.
I know it did make her happy for the hard drive not to spin up all night.

I can only assume there will be a small amount of power saving from F@H not needed the physical hard drive spun up and writing files all the time.

Just thought I would share my experiment with the group .....

 

I tired this a while back, and a flash drive is very slow.
The write times was very low and dropped SMP units by 400 PPD or more.
This was due to the times it takes to write each checkpoint to the drive.

This method is free , provided you have enough free ram in the system, and I am only using 500MB (only about 200MB being used)

Update on the Laptop PPD.

I took those reading after a reboot, and now that 4 hours has passed, the PPD has gone up to 576.00 PPD , so a gain of about 12PPD.

Granted it is not much, but any PPD increase it awesome.

So, it appears there is a very slight increase in F@H speed.

 

You can. (Using VMWare Server 2.x & Notfred ISO)

Log into the web interface --> On the right column, go to Edit Host Settings ..

Under the Additional Memory Options, select " Fit all Virtual Machines into reserved ram"

 

A small update:

After 3 days of running a Ram Drive on all my system, I am seeing a 1-3% increase in PPD.
I can only assume that I am saving a few seconds at each checkpoint and it is adding up.

I have been very pleased with the performance so far.
I have not had time to measure to power savings but I do know that having all my hard drives not spin up every 30 min is saving *some* wattage ...

 

I am now about 1 week into this little experment.

All is running great and I now have all my F@H clients running on ramdrives on various systems (excluding vm smp clients).

All have had no issues running, or with reboots with drive image backups and restores handeled by the app.

The 1-3% increase in PPD combined with the hard drive power savings is wonderful.

I am going to keep them on this due to the benefits I have observed.

 

That is odd. I am running it on 2 Vista x64 SP2 sytems, and 1 Server 2008 x64 system without issues.