Putting Scrap on a RAM Disc

From RISC OS

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Latest revision as of 17:54, 29 May 2009

From a Usenet post by David Ruck.

Putting !Scrap in a RAM disc is an archaic practice dating back to the use of RISC OS 2 and floppy discs, where to transfer data between applications, you would have to reinsert the system disc containing !Scrap.

These days it's not beneficial and bad practice for several reasons:

• Applications mainly use RAM transfer for exchanging data between each other, so already work faster than disc, and also faster than a RAM disc.

• Some applications such as Photodesk may need to store 100MB or more of data when processing large images. A static RAM disc is unlikely to be this large, and even if using a dynamic RAM disc such as MemFS the memory would be far better used directly by the application. In the image cache in the case of Photodesk.

• The RAM disc on the Iyonix actually has a lower peak transfer rate than the ATA 100 disc.

• Some applications store transient data in !Scrap, which can be regenerated, but takes additional time at start up, e.g. the RUfl font cache used by NetSurf.