Unless the ramdisk (AKA tmpfs in modern Linux) is compressed.
Many low footprint Linux installations now include swapping to zram, which is compressed. The net effect is positive since you usually have an abundance of spare CPU cycles.
Well yeah, that was both josmala's (the original commenter) and my point. Putting the swap file in compressed memory (here DriveSpace+SmartDrive) can be good, putting it into a straight, uncompressed ramdisk is worse than useless.
Re:RAM Doubler 2 (1996)
by lallysingh on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @08:31AM
(#18120887)
Conversely making your tmp dir a ramdisk was a huge benefit for compilers, because they created lots of temp files in their work.
Re:RAM Doubler 2 (1996)
by tomatocracy on Saturday October 06, 2018 @06:22PM
(#18157619)
If I remember correctly, this was usually done because Windows 3.x couldn't handle the full amount of RAM in the system directly for one or other reason. I might be misremembering but I recall some IO cards created a 'hole' by placing memory mapped IO regions somewhere well above 1MB (15M or so?) and Windows couldn't handle non contiguous physical RAM at that point in the address space as an example.
By contrast, I remember people putting swap files (most prominently the Win386 one) into straight RAMDISKs, which should really just give you a net negative effect all across the board.