Memory Trick Could Speed Up the Web | Hacker News Reader

Memory Trick Could Speed Up the Web

technologyreview.com

3 pointsFSecurePal2 comments

Ousterhout's proposed system is based on dynamic random access memory (DRAM). [..] In a data center, fetching bits from DRAM and sending them over the center's internal network should be 100 to 1,000 times faster than getting it from a disk.

So the "trick" is "caching data in memory" but with more memory and spread across multiple machines. This is already the bread and butter for many infrastructure developers and sysadmins.

It'll be more interesting to see what memristor technology brings. The first commercially available solutions are due in the next couple of years and we'll most likely have cost effective, non-volatile DRAM-speed memory by 2020.

See also:

    mkdir /media/ramdisk
    chmod 777 /media/ramdisk
    mount -t tmpfs -o size=1024M tmpfs /media/ramdisk/

Note: Do not copy/paste this in to your shell unless you know what you're doing. This will immediately seize 1 GB of RAM that you may or may not have free. Any data you put there will go up in smoke if your system loses power or is forced to reboot without first copying the data to persistent storage.

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