OT - RAM disks - WAS Re: [gentoo-user] Network failed and weird error message

[Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org>]

On 2013-10-13 5:49 PM, Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
> Talk about putting some stuff on tmpfs.  O_O  I have always wanted to
> copy the tree to tmpfs and run "time emerge -uvaDN world".  Just to see
> how fast it will go.  lol

I remember once I worked for an Apple reseller that had this accounting 
program that required them to do some kind of 'reconciliation' every 
month that required a massive amount of processing - it took like 36 
hours or something ridiculous (literally almost took all weekend), and 
he had implemented a rule that someone had to be there the entire time 
to baby sit the process - apparently it wasn't uncommon for there to be 
an error that would require them to restart it - and this was on a 
pretty powerful system at the time.

Well, one weekend, when we were building a system for a customer with 
tons of RAM (for the time) I talked them into a little experiment. The 
boss didn't believe me when I told him I could get the reconciliation 
processing time down to less than a day (I told him probably just a few 
hours, but wasn't sure)... so we made a bet.

I took a Quadra 900 (or maybe it was a 950), and added a bunch of RAM - 
I think we got it up to 128MB or something ridiculous (this was in about 
1992). The accounting DB was about 40MB at the time, but hey, we had the 
RAM, so I just loaded it up.

I created a RAM disk, copied the entire Accounting DB into it, and 
started running the reconciliation. The process finished after about 45 
minutes (I was even surprised at that), and while there were no errors 
and it said it had completed successfully, the boss was sure that 
something had gone wrong. So, he re-ran it the old way on the old 
server, and almost 2 days later, when the numbers matched, he just shook 
his head and paid me off, muttering about the lost weekends over the 
last 5 years he'd been there. He kept that machine around for running 
the reconciliation for at least a few months, but then I left, so no 
idea how long he kept it for...