Is it possible to run BOINC from a RAM drive to increase speed? I have WinXP (32 bit) and Ubuntu (64 bit) machines, both with 1gB RAM. Note that about 1/3 is used on the Win XP machine and thought about running a RAM drive to increase speed. Machines run 24/7/365.

Also, can you run multiple instances of BOINC on the same computer at the same time? I realize that it would use less CPU and more RAM, but is it even possible?

A:) Bad idea.
B:) No.

Running from ram may speed things up, but any computer failure and you lose all of your work units.

There are many reasons why several copies of BOINC won't work, but why would you want to?
One copy of BOINC can take care of every project currently available, which I think is about 90, and it will handle dozens of WUs from each project. (For those projects that allow this, and have short WUs.)

RAM drive is no good, but still intend to test this on a very fast USB drive with 25mb sec w/r speed (a 8gb Cruzer). Bad part is the swapfile use which has most i/o. That would still reside on the HD, lest the whole system is diskless. USB drives don't have longevity.

Few years ago I was talking with Honza about him using HW RAM drive PCI cards, sized maybe 4GB or 8GB, I do not remember exactly anymore. As it was not possible to overcome the 3-4 GB RAM limit for 32 bit Windows, this way he was able to map such fast drive and create huge swap file (with RAM speed) on it - effectively expanding available memory for many applications.

I can not find the messages anymore.

Peter

Accidentally find this thread so...

Yes, I'm using Gigabytes i-RAM for quite a while. This is quite different from SW RAMDrives. It is a PCI card with DDR slots, SATA interface and battery backup for several hours. For an OS, it behaver just like any HD - and it's damn fast.
If a computer crashes or there is a power outage, you don't loose your data.

If you are about to use SW RamDrive, I would suggest to deal with 2 topics first.
1. Automatically copy data to a HD before OS restart (even better with restore during OS startup). For example Cenatek RamDrive has this ability.
2. Making regular backups to a HD. Something like stopping BOINC service, packing to a HD/network, restarting BOINC would do.

So, I would say it's possible but one should be carefull.
Albeit do not expect any significants speed-up.
You may have your HD working only when needed, less fragmented etc. while running BOINC 24/7. So, there are really some benefits.

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BOINC Project specifications and hardware requirements