Save your HD's and run the bbs off a RAMDISK!

[Iceman]

So lately I've been getting a lot of people asking me how to setup and run worldgroup and they all keep talking about getting these fancy raid5 arrays and how they will be needed to keep things going smooth in case of failure... (you should see the processors they think they need, I just upgraded from a p2-300 after it finally died 15 years later?)

Computers have gotten to the point where you can have enough RAM on your system (100x faster than any HD) to run the entire BBS in it... and best of all it doesn't matter how fragmented the files are, still comes up at the same speed...

A company called Dataram makes a program called RAMDisk... its free... so I've already gotten over the first hurdle with you... free... believe me I know this isn't a cheap hobby sometimes so this is a bonus.

next you'll actually need the extra ram on your system to dedicate to the drive... now lets be honest here, there are probably a lot of files in your directory now you could get rid of and really crunch down the system to be very compact... I myself started with 512MB ramdisk and eventually expanded to 1024MB just because I liked temporarily putting lots of other things on there for personal use because of the extreme speed...

so if you have an extra 512MB of ram on your machine (with systems now coming with 8GB standard this is an easy grab) you should be able to find this an easy way to save yourself the headache of HD activity going nonstop on a busy system... if you only run the BBS on this machine and you already have 2GB of system ram, you've got more than enough to run the BBS and the OS.

Sure you might have to change the install directory of worldgroup to be say your E: drive but thats a quick fix for not having the stress on a group of HD's... if you have a large file area I'm sure you can still host that on seperate drives while the main bbs runs on the ramdisk.

Now some will say what about hardware failure or losing power?!?! Well I can't think of the last time I've had RAM be the failure point in my systems, everything else under the sun but thats been one issues that doesn't seem have hurt me since its not a mechanical moving device... and for power failure I'm hoping most people have a UPS battery to give the system the few minutes it needs to shut down in the event of a failure? The software will make an image of the ramdisk on your C: drive when shutting down... plus I'm sure you all have your morning backups, as well as ramdisk able to save a disk image at a predefined time period, I just do it every 12 hours not a real biggy.

So with ramdisk for free, and having extra ram you're not using... why not give yourself the benefit of 10x faster reads/writes and get rid of the HD bottleneck in your system... cleanup goes MUCH quicker when its reading and writing to ram than to a HD... in fact if you have a larger ramdisk, you can setup your cleanup file to copy the entire bbs into a backup directory, then later on have a windows event that zips and moves it to a hard drive so you don't have to delay cleanup to run the zip and writing on the HD...

if it wasn't for the grace period on my system, my cleanup would be 15 seconds from start to finish since I've removed the hard drive... I just got annoyed one night from all the scsi chatter and looked for an alternative and wondered if we can do it for our web servers with 128GB of ram to cache the most used files, why not worldgroup server...

P.S. anyone still use ultra scsi drives, I've got a bunch of backups just in case something failed on the raid I never used... still in wrap.

---edit---

on some versions of windows you will need to go into the disk manager, and right click on the ram set aside to re-enabled the ramdrive everytime you reboot... I think this is changed in other windows versions as the software is better able to work in them... just wanted people to be aware of this after installing it and then not instantly see'ing a new drive added to their windows explorer... have to go in there and enable the disk, and then give it a drive letter also... I think vista/win7 are okay but XP and below will need to enable the drive.

[Stoneslinger76]

So lately I've been getting a lot of people asking me how to setup and run worldgroup and they all keep talking about getting these fancy raid5 arrays and how they will be needed to keep things going smooth in case of failure... (you should see the processors they think they need, I just upgraded from a p2-300 after it finally died 15 years later?)

Computers have gotten to the point where you can have enough RAM on your system (100x faster than any HD) to run the entire BBS in it... and best of all it doesn't matter how fragmented the files are, still comes up at the same speed...

A company called Dataram makes a program called RAMDisk... its free... so I've already gotten over the first hurdle with you... free... believe me I know this isn't a cheap hobby sometimes so this is a bonus.

next you'll actually need the extra ram on your system to dedicate to the drive... now lets be honest here, there are probably a lot of files in your directory now you could get rid of and really crunch down the system to be very compact... I myself started with 512MB ramdisk and eventually expanded to 1024MB just because I liked temporarily putting lots of other things on there for personal use because of the extreme speed...

so if you have an extra 512MB of ram on your machine (with systems now coming with 8GB standard this is an easy grab) you should be able to find this an easy way to save yourself the headache of HD activity going nonstop on a busy system... if you only run the BBS on this machine and you already have 2GB of system ram, you've got more than enough to run the BBS and the OS.

Sure you might have to change the install directory of worldgroup to be say your E: drive but thats a quick fix for not having the stress on a group of HD's... if you have a large file area I'm sure you can still host that on seperate drives while the main bbs runs on the ramdisk.

Now some will say what about hardware failure or losing power?!?! Well I can't think of the last time I've had RAM be the failure point in my systems, everything else under the sun but thats been one issues that doesn't seem have hurt me since its not a mechanical moving device... and for power failure I'm hoping most people have a UPS battery to give the system the few minutes it needs to shut down in the event of a failure? The software will make an image of the ramdisk on your C: drive when shutting down... plus I'm sure you all have your morning backups, as well as ramdisk able to save a disk image at a predefined time period, I just do it every 12 hours not a real biggy.

So with ramdisk for free, and having extra ram you're not using... why not give yourself the benefit of 10x faster reads/writes and get rid of the HD bottleneck in your system... cleanup goes MUCH quicker when its reading and writing to ram than to a HD... in fact if you have a larger ramdisk, you can setup your cleanup file to copy the entire bbs into a backup directory, then later on have a windows event that zips and moves it to a hard drive so you don't have to delay cleanup to run the zip and writing on the HD...

if it wasn't for the grace period on my system, my cleanup would be 15 seconds from start to finish since I've removed the hard drive... I just got annoyed one night from all the scsi chatter and looked for an alternative and wondered if we can do it for our web servers with 128GB of ram to cache the most used files, why not worldgroup server...

P.S. anyone still use ultra scsi drives, I've got a bunch of backups just in case something failed on the raid I never used... still in wrap.

---edit---

on some versions of windows you will need to go into the disk manager, and right click on the ram set aside to re-enabled the ramdrive everytime you reboot... I think this is changed in other windows versions as the software is better able to work in them... just wanted people to be aware of this after installing it and then not instantly see'ing a new drive added to their windows explorer... have to go in there and enable the disk, and then give it a drive letter also... I think vista/win7 are okay but XP and below will need to enable the drive.

I sure hope you help new sysops learn correctly and dont confuse them with ramdrive stuff. Send them to this forum for help.

In order for the Btrieve engine to work properly it does require disk space, running in a ramdrive you will slowly loose data intergrity of all .dll's over a few months. At which point the bbs crashes and your latest backup's would be useless due to the corrupt data in the .dll's and .dat's.

You can tweak btrieves engine to make use of larger amounts of memory and probably equel the performance of your "ramdrive" without data loss. Be carefull when makeing changes to btreive and be sure you understand what your changeing. Setting some things to high will reduce performance and possibly crash or loose data. Not for the inexperienced sysop.

I am curious what is your response time on the sysop console running in ramdrive, also cpu speed/mfg?

[Iceman]

I sure hope you help new sysops learn correctly and dont confuse them with ramdrive stuff. Send them to this forum for help.

In order for the Btrieve engine to work properly it does require disk space, running in a ramdrive you will slowly loose data intergrity of all .dll's over a few months. At which point the bbs crashes and your latest backup's would be useless due to the corrupt data in the .dll's and .dat's.

You can tweak btrieves engine to make use of larger amounts of memory and probably equel the performance of your "ramdrive" without data loss. Be carefull when makeing changes to btreive and be sure you understand what your changeing. Setting some things to high will reduce performance and possibly crash or loose data. Not for the inexperienced sysop.

I am curious what is your response time on the sysop console running in ramdrive, also cpu speed/mfg?

Well, one year later, no corruption, no data loss, no dll problems, no btrieve errors trying to read files...

I guess I would ask you to look (and try) how this RAMDisk software actually works and not just make assumptions on it... I know we all have our own preferences, experiences, and preconceived notions about everything in life... but the software as far as data is concerned, IS a hard drive, and there is nothing to distinguish it from a moving mechanical device versus a non-moving mechanical device (stick of ram).

I understand you feel the need to counter anything I say at this point as incorrect or not the best practice since you have formed an opinion of me already, but please try it before stating it doesn't work and I have no business recommending this to others just because you don't like me personally.

Just like a hard drive has software to interface with the operating system, this software acts as that interface to the hardware which in this case is areas of physical memory... as far as the operating system is concerned this is a hard drive... it does not slowly corrupt data, it does not slowly cause data loss.

btrieve I'm sure can be tweaked, I'm sure many things can, I am simply giving people another approach to running the system off an 8ns drive versus a 15ms drive... while your way may very well work, my way does as well... so its appreciated that instead of saying this is bad and I should do it another way... wouldn't it be better if you wrote another thread detailing a better way that you feel is correct in your opinion?

years ago it was common to have a raid5 array with a 128MB caching controller from adaptec... and some people went to extremes of having 3 seperate scsi controllers so they could get maximum thruput of each and every drive at once just to increase system performance... now we are to the point where you can have your main system drive, a mirrored drive for epople who are worried about HD loss... and now you can run a RAMDisk ramdrive for i/o intense applications on top of that...

This is just another alternative to listening to HD chatter reading and writing 24/7 and to get extra performance... even with cached HD's, extra system cache, it'll still read and write... why not eliminate the slowest bottleneck?

my system? Well its complete and utter overkill for worldgroup... I am coming from a p2-300mhz with ultra scsi drives to this new system which is an xw8600 workstation with dual X5450 cpu's and 16MB of ram with mirrored SAS drives at 15k rpm... (not sure why I mention the drives they never load worldgroup, thats all in ram, only use them to store backups.)

my average response time on the console is 5ms as long as I am actively on the machine or running something else in the background... which is what I typically got off the p2-300mhz as well with lots of cache... so either system was almost identical to worldgroups console response time... in fact on this system it actually gores up to 8ms because I put the machine in power saving mode most of the time... no reason to run an 800 watt system at full capacity when its only using typical 1 to 2% of the cpu... like I said its way overkill, it just happens to be the only machine I had around after I lost the last one 15 years later from its start date.

cleanup time takes roughly 15 seconds without the grace period, with the grace period it takes an extra 2min...

P.S. PLEASE don't confuse RAMDisks software as the old ramdrive most windows users are familiar with... this is NOT the average ramdrive windows created... this is server class software used by hundreds of thousands of high end servers (and now many gamers are picking up on it because they have tons of ram, but don't want to buy a solid state drive because thats quite expensive, and had a finite amount of read/writes associated with it... thats why I don't recommend SSD drives to people, they WILL fail in the future, they are getting better but have a finite life.)

Give the software a try on a backup system you might have around? If you've got enough ram and can fit worldgroup on 512MB (or more if you need/have the ram) create a new drive out of it... then try running your cleanup to see the speed difference you get with using RAM versus a HD, thats all I ask... give it a try and see... maybe it won't work out for you, or doesn't suite your needs, hey thats fine, don't change what you're doing if it works... but don't tell others it doesn't work when you've never tried it... especially don't tell people it causes corruption and loss issues, thats not cool man when you've never used this software... I have for a year now... as long as you have a UPS battery and can shut down your system in time, no issues or data loss.

Once again this is an overkill for most... I just prefer to use system ram, than beat a couple HD's down daily with lots of reads and writes, if I can save them and increase my performance, total win... anyone who deals with tons of i/o requests can appreciate the performance gains, and anyone who uses cache can appreciate it as well... you should see the size of my majormud buffers in ram... whole things loaded.

----edit---- I should mention I have removed one of the cpu's to save on power... 120 watts a piece adds up... still same response times mentioned above, but like I said, way overkill for worldgroup (don't need a lot of cpu except for cleanup, its all ram/HD performance)

[Stoneslinger76]

try it before stating it doesn't work

Where did I day that it doesn't work? SHOW ME! Not true, I said Btreive requires disk space to write to and I dont recomend useing the method of "ramdrive software".

Yet again you make another post where you say one thing in the beginning and latter admit to running the opposite.

ie no more raid, then you state you run a mirror=raid1

Its not that I dont like you, I dont know you so how can I make an accurate judgement, altho your continued flip/flop attitude is definatly puting me on one side of like/dislike.

[Iceman]

Someone sent me a message saying I made an overly complex message for a simple product and should explain it different...

Every computer basically has the following drives...

C:\ Hard Drive
D:\ CD/DVD Drive

What I am suggesting is you add another drive...

E:\ Ramdisk Hard Drive

This software I recommend acts like you just installed a new Hard Drive to your computer, you use it and access it just like any other typical Hard Drive would be used. This new "Ramdisk Hard Drive" uses your system RAM to create itself with.

You may then install Worldgroup onto this drive as you would on any other drive. You may copy/delete/whatever you want as if this were another system drive. Worldgroup and/or Windows will not treat it any different than a normal drive.

Pro's

No additional cost (assuming you have enough system ram)
Faster access times than a standard hard drive (typical 8ns versus 12ms)
No wear and tear like a hard drive (just memory reads and writes)

Con's

Just like system memory, power failures make you lose all data in this memory (so you better have a UPS on your system if you use this, you should anyhow even without this)
Systems with small amounts of RAM won't have much left for applications

Example's

Say you have a computer with 2GB of RAM, you could use this software and create a 512MB Ramdisk Hard Drive to run Worldgroup on. Some systems will need more or less depending what modules and other programs they have associated with their BBS.

I myself use a 1GB Ramdisk Hard Drive and that leaves me plenty of space leftover for other things, however I have 8GB of system RAM so I have plenty leftover for other applications to use.

Now I realize this will not be for every Sysop, and thats fine, this is for people who have a lot more computer than they need, and would like to help conserve the wear and tear on their physical Hard Drive and take advantage of faster memory to speed things up on their BBS.

This software does not cause corruption, your system will not over time degrade and fall apart, it acts as a normal Hard Drive so any functionality you need to be present will be. This is similar to an SSD Hard Drive, except you don't need to buy an actual drive, you use your current resorces!

I have been running my system this way for almost 2 years now without any corruption, crashes, or other problems associated with this... and with over 100 people currently online I can't think of a better demonstration.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and- ... e/ramdisk/

The software is freeware as long as your Ramdisk is 4GB or smaller, which I'm guessing almost everyone would stay under easily.

-Matthew