Chrome running from ramdisk? not exactly

so I have been trying to use ramdisk's on my new laptop GS70, I've been using them for years with excellent results

so obviously I got one taking care of temp variables in windows and other temporary files, this one is not saved to an image file

then I have two more both of them are saved to image files, one is solely for Opera browser which I was also able to get to store cache and profile files on the same ramdisk so I am super happy, Opera 20 is basically chromium so It misses some of the chrome stuff and it feels barren by comparison but it is ridiculously fast running off the ramdisk and caching all it's stuff on it at the same time

and a third small ramdisk is for other small apps that are pretty disk intensive or run in background all the time

my task manager looks very different now, whole system is more responsive and opera is just insane

I've been using softperfect ramdisk for a few years now and it still works great on this new laptop

I was using Firefox Portable with a ram disk for awhile. It was on a desktop. To avoid slowing down the shutdown I discarded changes and loaded the ram disk using xcopy. This had the effect that I had to run FF portable from HD if I wanted to keep changes or AddOn installs. I haveen't tried it with the Laptop. The hybrid booting may make the image saving acceptable.

Out of curiosity I did the FF ramdisk again. Amazingly it doesn't load any faster. 27.0 Portable is fast even off HD. The pages do snap up faster once you start clicking. But not all that much. Older FF the speedup was much more pronounced. The image save seems to be fast enough when using the Laptop shutdown=sleep setting. I haven't tried it yet holding down shift during shutdown.

I usually have minimum of 20 tabs open in Opera so the difference is massive and ramdisk makes a backup at whatever intervals it's set to

I have Firefox Portable set to use 0 cache. It uses a couple GB ram but that's ok. Opera x64 is fast even off the HD though. It's too bad they never got real about hotkeys and cut and paste etc... To me triple and quad click the mouse to copy a word line or paragraph to clipboard is asking for CTS. But anyway, FF AddOns tend to lock one in.

I did chromium for awhile. Fast but it got insane with 8 or 10 processes to run 1/2 dozen tabs. Once FF got fast with a single exe I quit using chromium. But things may chang again in 6 months.

it's not just about speed, the way chrome and chromium uses the drive for caching, with it's myriad of reading and writing it can't be good in a long run for the SSD's (I only have those inside my laptop) plus it's hundreds times faster running from memory, as I'm writing this I have 80 tabs open and there is no noticable slow down in the sustem, fan's are not running and all Opera operations are instant

I have 80 tabs open and there is no noticable slow down in the sustem, fan's are not running and all Opera operations are instant

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Wow! Talk about extensive testing... nice work! Personally, I have done some rudimentary testing myself using FF and I really didn't see any noticeable speed benefit (as implied by MilesAhead) because my target was only to ensure 100% privacy protection. Of course, that means the RAM would be emptied on shutdown and not saved for the next boot. Moreover, I also determined that FF does not write anything to disk if you have it set to "never remember anything" as shown below so (I think) it is always using just RAM anyway.



However, I can only assume if my target was to save my browsing history to disk, then your testing shows me there would be a real benefit in using a ramdisk for anyone that uses as many tabs as described. Again, nice work.

my2cents

@quantumrider Super tab intensive use is a whole different ball of wax. I'm sure you will always know much more about it than I. I use a little kludge I wrote to tack URLs from a text file onto the command line. Opening 9 pr 10 tabs on startup is plenty for my needs. It has the virtue that I can use it with any browser than can open new urls in tabs, and accepts multiple urls on the command tail.

But I'm on several forums where posters use dozens of tabs. When I want to know what the really good FF AddOns are I ask them.

i'm not testing with 80 tabs open... i'm genuinely crazy, that's how I use it, so currently i have 3 separate windows of Opera opened each with 20 to 80 tabs and listening to Google Play and watching videos on youtube and vimeo for my work and there is not a choke... so hey, can your browser do that?

quantumrider said:

i'm not testing with 80 tabs open... i'm genuinely crazy, that's how I use it, so currently i have 3 separate windows of Opera opened each with 20 to 80 tabs and listening to Google Play and watching videos on youtube and vimeo for my work and there is not a choke... so hey, can your browser do that?

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I didn't doubt you. I know a guy on another forum whose Taskbar takes up half the desktop. I imagine he has it set to AutoHide.