Much faster when ran from ramdisk #2271

bitcoin-qt is much faster downloading blocks when database (~5Gb) is on ramdisk. So I think whole process can be optimized even if run from HDD - just need to use available memory to cache data and write to disk seldom.

Disk caching is your OS's job... and 0.8 already does a better job at this in general.

That is the problem, that this "OS job" is not working in this scenario (perhaps because it does not have priorities to what should be kept in disk cache and for how long and have strict barriers for write buffers expiration), so this should be application job IMHO.

Well, give 0.8rc1 a try when it's released. Should be any day now.

ok, thanks!

Another non-issue IMHO, every I/O limited application WILL be faster when residing in a RAM disk...

My point is just it can use system memory explicit way, and not to write to disk everytime it finished with one block. This definitely will be faster.

If you take ANY application, rewrite it so all the data that it uses will be on disk, not in memory, it will be I/O limited application then. But apperantly programmers sometimes use disk and sometimes memory, to avoid creating too many IO limited applications.

I learned that already and I'm tell you, that the client is not optimized to be "FAST", but the highest priority is data-safety and sane code. As Luke pointed out, we switched the DB engine from BDB to LevelDB for everything except the wallet (which still uses BDB), so 0.8 will be much more ressource friendly :).

ok, cool. thanks.