Alejandro & Juan,
First off, a thanks to Alejandro for the advice on using a ramdisk. I built a new system to take advantage of the higher resolutions in the latest update. I set it up with a 64Gb cache partition on each of my two SSDs and a ramdisk using 15Gb of my 32Gb of RAM. I tested any number of different settings with the benchmark script, including using just the cache files, just the ramdisk and a combination of the two. Using just the ramdisk (and pointing to it 6 or 8 times - the difference was marginal between the two), gave me by far the best results. For example, my swap number went to well over 18,000 and my MiB/s is over 3400. Not Juan's 6GiB/s but pretty darn good!
I do have a follow-up question, however. I have three drives, two 256GB SSDs and a 3Tb HDD for storing my images and other bulk files, etc. Using the recommendation in the global preferences settings, I have set up the 64Gb cache partitions on each of the SSDs. Given that the ramdisk is limited to 15Gb, and the fact that PI clearly could use as much swap space as possible, how do I get the maximum benefit out of my current set up? Do I ignore the benchmark results and add in at least one pointer to the SSD cache partitions? Is there another way to tap into all that fast disk space while still using the ramdisk as efficiently as possible?
By the way, I ended up going with Windows 10 on the new rig (my old brain tried and failed again to get Linux to play nice, this time Fedora 22, sigh). Windows 10 is a vast improvement on Windows 8 or 8.1, if for no other reason (though there are many others) than 10 kills that damned charms bar constantly popping up on the right side of your screen. I hated that thing with a passion, but I digress.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Best,
Jim
