View Full Version : RamDisk XBMC
Discaciate
2009-02-22, 23:24
I was thinking about setting a ramdisk driver for XBMC, specially for the cache files.
I have a dedicated HTPC with 4Gb RAM, and I wonder if I will see good improvements while browsing my media (I have around 110 movies and coverflow is starting to get less fluid).
Did any of you guys try it? Can you suggest any software for it? I wonder if it worth the effort.
For those of you that don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_disk
getting windows to cache to a ramdisk usually improves performance alot.. so I can't see why it wouldn't benefit xbmc aswell
Discaciate
2009-02-22, 23:48
Thx for your reply. That's what I'm hopping for.
But I just dunno how to make XBMC use the ramdisk as cache.
Can I change the default cache directory? Any ideas?
Or should I just install XBMC into the ramdrive (the problem is that I'm not sure how well that would work, considering that I would have to use some backup supporting software, since the ramdisk is volatile).
hmm what cpu are you usin? on my intel core duo 6850 with 4gb ram and a big library (beyond 1000 movies) its fast as hell ?!
since the ramdisk is deleted on shutdown it wouldnt be a good solution, try a different approach .. stuff your profile onto another disk/partition this could also help a lot!
as far as i know you couldn't move the cache dir, only thing you could do is install xbmc onto another disc and use the -p command line switch so the profile path isn't used!
Discaciate
2009-02-23, 00:08
The CPU is a little on the slow side... It's a AMD64 5000x2.
All of the views are good, but the coverflow (using media stream skin) is getting a little slow.
I'm also preparing my media for AEON, so the covers are quite big...
wierd0n3
2009-02-23, 00:13
I use the AR Soft RAM Disk software on XP. http://arsoft-online.com very small (under 100k) and can be scaled to any size.
Haven't used it for anything other than web and temp encoding caching, but i do notice a difference in speed since I'm not thrashing the disk.
personally, i don't see a way for it to benefit XBMC, except for thumbnail generation and retrieval, and even then, you would have to sync the ram drive every time you close XBMC. (although EventGhost would make that kinda easy)
Lemme know if there are other benefits, I'm kinda interested in this too.