Unintentional geek humor

So, I saw a post on a technical forum I read about a user who’s been having weird problems with his Mac OS X system. You see, in an effort to make his computer faster, he set up a RAMdisk, then told the system to use the RAMdisk as its virtual memory swap space.

Fifteen geek points to anyone who just read that and either winced or started laughing.

36 thoughts on “Unintentional geek humor

  1. Okay, so how many points if you’ve suggested this very course of action to someone (as a joke, of course!)?

    And how many points if you can come up with a scenario where that might actually be beneficial, however twisted (‘cuz I can!)?

    • As a joke? I’d say at least 5 points?

      Seriously? If you know why this is a bad idea and also know of those situations where it’s useful, at least 25. (I can think of a few situations where one might actually do this–when booting from a self-contained system on read-only media, for example, or when running some kind of disk repair application or other program where it is imperative that nothing be written to the hard drive.)

  2. Okay, so how many points if you’ve suggested this very course of action to someone (as a joke, of course!)?

    And how many points if you can come up with a scenario where that might actually be beneficial, however twisted (‘cuz I can!)?

    • There’s no reason it shouldn’t work; it just adds a couple layers of overhead into accomlishing exactly the same thing.

      I’ve heard that most of the performance improvements from Win95 to Win98 (including roughly tripling the boot speed) came from making the virtual memory and disk cache systems aware of each other. In Win95, it was common for disk reads to be cached, leading to using more memory than the system physically had, leading to offloading that memory to the virtual memory system, which was then cached, etc. They apparently worked out the situations that would lead to infinite loops, but it was still pretty stupid.

  3. …and yet there are some flavors of linux that suggest doing this.

    I actually *think* knoppix will do it, because the allocation structures of certain kernels are better able to handle being out of swap than they are out of ram, since most will use all the ram with reckless abandon, but be more conservative about the “cost” of swapping.

      • Yes, which was why I (mistakenly) thought it did the “ramdisk-as-swap” thing.

        I heard about this technique (but not on debian/knoppix) from a fairly active linux person a while ago, and was a little awed myself. But they seemed to know what they were talking about.

  4. …and yet there are some flavors of linux that suggest doing this.

    I actually *think* knoppix will do it, because the allocation structures of certain kernels are better able to handle being out of swap than they are out of ram, since most will use all the ram with reckless abandon, but be more conservative about the “cost” of swapping.

  5. Yes, which was why I (mistakenly) thought it did the “ramdisk-as-swap” thing.

    I heard about this technique (but not on debian/knoppix) from a fairly active linux person a while ago, and was a little awed myself. But they seemed to know what they were talking about.

  6. Ouch, lol.
    It ran? *shudder*
    Btw, Hi! I recently friended you. I believe a humorous post got me here, but then I saw some other interesting posts regarding life, etc, and thought I might like to read. My journal, on the other hand, is currently dullsville.

  7. Ouch, lol.
    It ran? *shudder*
    Btw, Hi! I recently friended you. I believe a humorous post got me here, but then I saw some other interesting posts regarding life, etc, and thought I might like to read. My journal, on the other hand, is currently dullsville.

  8. As a joke? I’d say at least 5 points?

    Seriously? If you know why this is a bad idea and also know of those situations where it’s useful, at least 25. (I can think of a few situations where one might actually do this–when booting from a self-contained system on read-only media, for example, or when running some kind of disk repair application or other program where it is imperative that nothing be written to the hard drive.)

  9. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work; it just adds a couple layers of overhead into accomlishing exactly the same thing.

    I’ve heard that most of the performance improvements from Win95 to Win98 (including roughly tripling the boot speed) came from making the virtual memory and disk cache systems aware of each other. In Win95, it was common for disk reads to be cached, leading to using more memory than the system physically had, leading to offloading that memory to the virtual memory system, which was then cached, etc. They apparently worked out the situations that would lead to infinite loops, but it was still pretty stupid.

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