The Design and the Implementation of the Network RamDisk
Xiaoliang Zhang · Modern Computer · 2001
Efficient data storage,a major concern in the modern computer industry,is mostly provided today by the traditional magnetic disk.Unfortunately the cost of a disk transfer measured in processor cycles continues to increase with time,making disk accesses increasingly expensive.In this paper we describe the design,implementation and evaluation of a device that uses main memory of remoteworkstations as a faster-than-disk storage device.Our Network Ram Disk has been implemented both on the Linux operating systems,as a block device driver without any modifications to the kernel code.Using several applications,we measure the performance and find it to be usually four to eight times faster than the magnetic disk.