Has anyone tried running Logos 4 on a RAM disk?
I'm interested to know if anyone has tried running Logos 4 on a RAM disk. I had in mind throwing my resources onto a RAM disk to see what would happen. Has anyone tried this?
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
Comments
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What's a RAM disk?
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This explains what a RAM disk is. It's a quantity of RAM (typically volatile), which is being identified and used by the computer as if it was a regular hard disk. The advantages are massive throughput and very low access times. The disadvantages include cost and the RAM capacity limitations of the motherboard being used.
I currently have 12GB of RAM in my computer, but I have room for 24GB. If I threw in another 12GB of RAM and made it a RAM disk, I could place all my Logos resources on the RAM disk. Given the improvements others have seen when using an SSD, I would be interested to know if using a RAM disk would result in analogous performance improvement.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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I have the memory to try it, as my desktop computer has 32GB of memory. However, if I understand what you are imagining, I think that is very dangerous. A RAM disk basically turns that memory into a disk drive, say drive E: If you are saying install Logos then on drive E:, yes it would be very fast when disk accesses are required (indexing for example).
But if the system goes down either due to power loss, forced reboot due to an update of something, or other reason, it's just like drive E: was lost. You not only lose your data, but you would have to reinstall Logos to the RAM drive again once the system came up. If I understand your question correctly, this is not what RAM disk is meant for, it's meant for things that can be lost when a system is rebooted/goes down, like pages being served across the web for example.
If you are thinking of using a RAM disk with Logos in a different way, I apologize, please explain your thoughts!
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Jonathan Burke said:
The disadvantages include cost and the RAM capacity limitations of the motherboard being used.
And the contents have to be loaded and saved with each restart/shutdown (using it for resources only will reduce the frequency of saving provided the RAM disk fully emulates junction points in an NTFS file system).
Jonathan Burke said:I would be interested to know if using a RAM disk would result in analogous performance improvement.
It could be faster but much will depend on the RAM disk software.
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Dominick Sela said:
But if the system goes down either due to power loss, forced reboot due to an update of something, or other reason, it's just like drive E: was lost.
SpeedStream sells RamDIsk Plus - Plus includes saving RAM disk image at system shutdown => http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php
DataRam also sells RamDisk software with save and load feature => http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk
Disclaimer: have not used any RamDisk software in Windows 7 - found more options => http://www.x64bitdownload.com/64-bit-ramdisk-downloads.html
RAM disk technical challenge - need RAM disk loaded before Logos Indexer runs after user login. Using a file system junction with a RAM disk is possible - use at own risk. Reboot idea - login as a Windows administrator (without Logos), setup Logos RAM Disk for user (including file system junction for logos folder) - then login to Windows user for Logos use (could reverse process for planned reboots and periodic saves of RAM disk contents to hard disk). Good idea to keep Logos stuff in sync with servers. Potentially could use RAM Disk for indexing (after indexing complete, backup RAM disk contents - logout user, use admin account). Admin user option - script RAM disk copying - add to admin account startup and shutdown.
Ongoing monitoring - RAM Disk free space (especially after purchasing more resources).
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Yes Dominick the RAM drive would have to be reloaded in the case of loss of power to the RAM. This is not a problem given that it would be mirrored on the hard drive. I'm not talking about the entire Logos folder, only the resources. I have a UPS, my computer is on 24/7, and I measure my uptime in weeks.
Mark, since I'm only talking about the resources folder the primary focus here is on read times. It seems we still know very little about what Logos as a program prefers in the way of resources, but when I experimented with Logos 3 and a powered RAM drive (the Gigabyte iRAM), I saw significant improvements in performance, and thought that Logos 4 might benefit from something similar, given that those with SSDs find it helps.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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I would be surprised if only housing the books in a Ram disk would give you all that much performance boost.
Logos maintains a number of databases for searching and other things... I would think loading all those databases would give a better performance boost than loading all the books in it. Of course I could be wrong since I haven't tried it...
Prov. 15:23
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Actually that's a good point Kevin, I keep forgetting it searches the index and not the books. So perhaps the index would benefit from a RAM drive. The index is much smaller too (my entire Logos 4 folder, including subfolders, is 21GB), only around 4.5GB on my machine.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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i would worry some about using the databases on a RAM disk. As you add notes and such which are saved in the databases, hopefully they would be sync'd to the cloud, but would not be saved on your hard drive. So everytime that you copied from your HD to the RAM disk, they would not have updated databases and would rely on sync'ing to the cloud to update the databases with info added from previous sessions. This could take longer and longer as you increased your notes over some period of time. If sync'ing didn't occur properly then you would loose your newly added notes or such.
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Jonathan Burke said:
and I measure my uptime in weeks.
There be the drawback. If only Logos ran on Unix this would be worthwhile ( decades without reboot !)
Logos 7 Collectors Edition
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Steve, having robocopy or another live sync tool periodically sync the RAM drive with my hard drive would be easy. I hardly ever use notes anyway. Matthew, weeks of uptime is plenty of time when you're using a RAM drive. I never had any problems when I was using the Gigabyte iRAM, and the UPS is there to give me time to sync and shutdown gracefully in emergencies.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Jonathan Burke said:
Steve, having robocopy or another live sync tool periodically sync the RAM drive with my hard drive would be easy. I hardly ever use notes anyway.
i see, it has been a long time since i've used a RAM disk. Nice that new tools are out there. As to what is saved in db's, there is a lot of stuff saved there: highlighting, layouts, etc.
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Jonathan Burke said:
weeks of uptime is plenty of time when you're using a RAM drive. I never had any problems when I was using the Gigabyte iRAM, and the UPS is there to give me time to sync and shutdown gracefully in emergencies.
Point well made. How about giving a go at it and let us know? We will have affordable 2TB SSD before I would get around to it.
The thought had never occurred to me to try RAM disk on Logos. I still operate under an invisible RAM ceiling imposed in a former life.
Logos 7 Collectors Edition
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I created a 5GB RAM disk and put the index there. This is what a search for 'God' looks like using the HDD.
Same search, using the RAM disk (after closing Logos and opening it again).
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Are you going to load any of the other L4 databases into the Ram drive? I'd be interested to see how fast you can get Logos this way.
Prov. 15:23
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I'm thinking about it. What else would you recommend putting on there?
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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I've looked through the Logos 4 folder on my system and with the way I use Logos I would guess that these dbs (these are the names of the folders that house dbs, often 2+ files are in these folders) might speed up my system. The databases themselves (with the exception of the indexes are not that big).
Data
- Bible Index
- Library Catalog
- Library Index
- Resourcemanager\Lemma Lists
Documents
- Layout Manager
- Library Catalog
- Resource Collection Manager
- UserPreferences
- Visual Markup
If I had enough Ram I would start with these and then as an experiment place all the Logos dbs I could find into the Ram disc to see what would happen.
Prov. 15:23
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Thanks Kevin, tomorrow I'll see if I can find the time to play around a bit more. I have room for all of those folders on my RAM drive (in fact I'll throw the entire 'Documents' folder on for a start), and the utility to which I linked makes writing junctions very simple.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Jonathan Burke said:
I created a 5GB RAM disk and put the index there. This is what a search for 'God' looks like using the HDD.
Same search, using the RAM disk (after closing Logos and opening it again).
Although the slowest part of my systems have always been me, that performance is an awesome improvement percentage-wise.
Logos 7 Collectors Edition
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Jonathan Burke said:
I created a 5GB RAM disk and put the index there. This is what a search for 'God' looks like using the HDD.
Same search, using the RAM disk (after closing Logos and opening it again).
Without knowing how Logos caches stuff this might not be all that impressive.
I searched for God in my entire library - 9.53 seconds; closed Logos, restarted it.
The second search was 3.65 seconds.
However, given that my second search improved more than yours it is possible that the cache was emptied in the time it took for you to move the index to memory.
Prov. 15:23
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Kevin Becker said:
However, given that my second search improved more than yours it is possible that the cache was emptied in the time it took for you to move the index to memory.
Yes, I've been wondering how to factor in the cache effect. I'm also not sure how long data remains in the cache. This morning, six hours after my previous test and after having restarted Logos, a search for 'the' took just 35 seconds and a search for 'God' took just under 5 seconds. I now have all the folders you listed, on the RAM disk.
My HDD seemed to be thrashing about a bit too much, and seemed slow in other applications, so I just checked it. Could be an issue here. Mmm, looks like CrystalMark wasn't particularly impressed with the RAM drive. That's not exactly the kind of benchmark I was expecting.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Well this is an improvement. I discovered I had the RAM disk set to save to the HDD every 300ms (the default setting), which slowed it down tremendously.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Yes, especially for how long it takes Crystal Disk Mark to run its tests.
How does Logos feel for general use (beyond simple search speeds) How is navigation, adding highlights, generating reports etc.?
Prov. 15:23
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Parallel resources appear virtually instantly; 30 parallel commentaries/translations appear in about a second. Navigation is a breeze, Bible passages turn up in Bibles and commentaries almost instantly. Layouts change several seconds faster, passage guides list my top six commentaries in about 3-4 seconds.
Commentaries open about half a second when I click on them. Most collections open instantly, my collection of 940 volumes of journals opens in just under a second. All dropdown windows open instantly.
A search for 'form criticism' in my journals found 1,524 hits in 741 articles in 0.21 seconds. A search for 'God' found 2,969,131 results in 517,282 articles in 3,230 resources in 4.21 seconds.
Unfortunately search speeds are erratic, and Logos still hits the HDD. I've run a disk check and found a few bad sectors on this drive, which is a worry, and it may be affecting Logos performance. I am thinking of seeing what happens when I rebuild my index.
I haven't tried running a report yet. Let me know what kind of report you think would be useful. I don't usually run reports, so I can't remember how to go about it actually.
Edit: Ok, ten minutes ago I told Logos to rebuild my index. It's now telling me it will be finished in 40 minutes. This will be interesting to watch. I wonder it it will work.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Ouch, the RAM disk ran out of room when I re-indexed. I'll re-index on my HDD to make sure I have a proper index, then move it to the RAM drive again.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Jonathan, your report is very interesting! When I asked about reports I was thinking Passage/Exegetical guides. I normally run a Passage guide for the list of commentaries I have on a passage and perhaps the grammar section of the Exegetical guide.
Another thing that would be interesting to see is how switching layouts works.
Thanks for doing this testing... of course my wallet might not thank you if I start shopping for large quantities of Ram!
Prov. 15:23
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Jonathan Burke said:
Unfortunately search speeds are erratic, and Logos still hits the HDD
It will access the resources to confirm a hit and get the results text (assuming they are not in RAM).
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Dave Hooton said:
It will access the resources to confirm a hit and get the results text (assuming they are not in RAM).
Right, well that's an overhead I wasn't expecting. So it looks like I'm going to need to put the resources onto a RAM drive as well in order to really find out if this will improve performance.
Win 7 x64 | Core i7 3770K | 32GB RAM | GTX 750 Ti 2GB | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (system) | Crucial m4 256GB SSD (Logos) | WD Black 1.5 TB (storage) | WD Red 3 TB x 3 (storage) | HP w2408h 24" | First F301GD Live 30"
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Jonathan Burke said:
Right, well that's an overhead I wasn't expecting. So it looks like I'm going to need to put the resources onto a RAM drive as well in order to really find out if this will improve performance.
It isn't something that would benefit me that much since I shut my computer down each evening. And when I get up each morning the first thing I do is sit down and do my daily Bible reading/study over a cup of coffee. I can't see waiting for the system to set up a RAM disk and copy 6.4 gig of resources over. My time is too tight each morning not to mention I don't have enough RAM to do it. But if you have the available RAM, set it up and leave your system running for days on end then there could be a significant advantage.
It will be interesting to see how your tests come out. I am going to be upgrading my system in the near future so if this proves to be very beneficial I may have to modify my routines to allow for it.
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Intel Core2 Duo E8400 3.00GHz @ 3472 MHz
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 220
4096MB System RAM0 -
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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