question about pfix=copy and ammount of ram

[gmdfunk]

OK. so I have a computer with 1gb of ram. what is the largest remastered pup_412.sfs I should try, or will be allowed to load to ram? I mean if the entire file system is loaded to ram, I would imagine you dont need alot of free ram to further run the OS do you?

[Bruce B]

Scenario: you made your own pup_412.sfs file? True?

The amount of RAM it would take should be about the size of the file itself. It is a compressed filesystem and does not expand in the copy process.

From a Puppy perspective, 1GB RAM is plenty to work with.

Does than answer anything for you? If not;

? ? ?

[Bruce B]

OK. so I have a computer with 1gb of ram. what is the largest remastered pup_412.sfs I should try, or will be allowed to load to ram? I mean if the entire file system is loaded to ram, I would imagine you dont need alot of free ram to further run the OS do you?

Upon reading more carefully, I think something is not understood. Even if pup_412.sfs is in RAM and has the bulk of the files, applications and files to not run in it.

It is a read + copy operation. Read from the filesystem and copy to RAM.

In this case you would be reading files pre-copied to RAM. Those specific files, the ones necessary to run the application you want to run are copied to RAM.

Now I suppose, I've really left you with questions.

[Pizzasgood]

When the pup_xxx.sfs file is copied into ram, that chunk of ram is treated like a harddrive (except it's located on a ram chip). When you run a program from the harddrive, the program is first copied into ram, and then executed. If you use pfix=copy, the program is already stored in ram, but that part of ram is being treated as a harddrive partition, so the program is still copied out into another part of ram, and then executed. The difference is that this time it's being copied from ram to ram, which is faster than from the harddrive to ram.

As far as I know, there's no way to make programs execute in-place when using pfix=copy, even though they're already in ram.

So what you do is look at how much ram you have, and how big the pup_xxx.sfs file for the version of Puppy you want to run is. Then you subtract the size of the pup_xxx.sfs file from your ram, and that is how much will be available for the system to use. You probably need from 50 to 100 MB free in order to run comfortably. So with 1 GB of ram, you can use a pup_xxx.sfs file of up to 900 MB without much trouble, in theory anyways. I've used a 600 MB pup_xxx.sfs file on a 1 GB ram system during Puppy 3.01 and it performed fine. I haven't tried (or even seen) anything larger.