Second Life using Solid State Harddrive?

Heya everyone!

after reading a post about a network card that supposedly gives Second Life a performance increase. I started thinking. Second Life is heavy on cache and the hard drive. so would using a Solid State hard drive boost performance? I am sure it would but really like to hear if anyone can confirm this.


Oh, and WOOT!

I tried putting my network cache on a RAM drive a couple months ago. I couldn't tell any difference.

Of course, if you have enough RAM to do that, Windows may already be doing effectively the same thing by caching data in memory.

SL is a pretty memory intense application that easily goes up to 400...500MB and more. If you configure a RAM disk of let's say 500 or 1000MB you will lose that memory and that may give you a performance penalty (swapping, graphics).

I don't know if a SSD would make real difference compared to a harddrive as you still have to go through the same bandwidth bottlenecks. Perhaps a good sensible approach would be a not too big RAM drive (<=500MB) if you have enough memory installed.

I have been using a 4GB iRAM for my SL cache and Windows pagefile. It hasn't been a dramatic improvement but it has helped.

actually I found for myself SL runs smoothly with an amount of 250mb Cache Size on a RAM Drive, I experimented quite a lot... evne bigger Caches siozes didnt any difference, but when using a ramdrive my HDD doesnt work that often and stays a lot cooler...

/me waves at Horny

Cool, will try that myself!

I use a 2G iRAM for the SL cache and it doesn't make a lot of difference. It does keep the hard drive from chattering, though.

There is even a chance that with a cheap SSD, performance will actually be worse! Many of the cheaper ssd's use the same controller chip, and use MLC type flash cells. A lot of those have been found to perform really really bad on "random writes": that is when a lot of small pieces of data are written in different places. This has something to do with the cache algorithm that their controller uses, together with the fact that MLC flash is slower (but cheaper) then the SLC type.

I can easily imagine that eg. the type of caching sl does qualifies as random writes, and thus the aforementioned type of ssd would then make performance drop instead of soar. I read in reviews that some of these drives cause windows to "choke" for up to a second on these occasions! (that may not sound like much, but having that happen a few times in a row is detrimental for the subjective feeling of performance).
According to the same reviews, drives that are almost certain to have good performance in such cases are the Intel MLC ones, or drives using SLC chips, both being relatively expensive...

The question also remains whether even these drives will gain enough performance to make it worth the premium price... Probably these will make SL start faster, but I'm not sure if they will show a lot of extra performance during the use of the client...

As for the "accelerating network card", I suppose it's one of these types that do TCP ofloading, eg calculating packet checksums on the card itself instead of your cpu. These are only worth it in servers, that can have huge amounts of traffic, but the relatively tiny amount of network traffic that sl generates is no problem to any of today's cpu's...

Mine's using regular PC133 DRAM DIMMS and a battery.

Yes, ok, I should have mentioned in my previous post that all that was about flash ssd's, not dram ssd's or other technology... but flash is the most widespread type of ssd I think...