major improvement
been using eboostr for some time now. it helps. my objective was to diminish hdd usage as much as possible and i managed to obtain that somehow.
eboostr help at reads. it really does if you use a fast flash or ram cache. however i’m a Visual Studio user and compiling is a very intensive write business. in this case eboostr does not help and the hdd keeps thrashing (significantly less than without eboostr). last night i was searching for an alternative… and found one. i won’t tell you it’s name here. this one does not have the bells and whistles that eboostr has but it has some very nice features. to be frank i didn’t know how to config it the first time as i did not notice anything that marked it’s presence. it can set cache on partition level. you can specify whether it should read ahead. you can specify the cluster size as i think (i’m not sure) it does not cache files but clusters of them. it has another quewl feature. it can do lazy writes. what that means is that it can delay writes some time and that REALLY helps in compilation businesses. i noticed that the project files (*.sln,*slo) in VS get read and written very intesively. well this tool really helps. it helped silence my pc even if i had in the backgound utorrent oppen and doing lots of traffic. it does that without stopping to rebuild its cache.
has some disadvantages though. it only supports ram caching. the interface could be a lot better. it’s a lot more expensive.
my wishes:
– it would be great to have lazy writes in eboostr and option to use them or not. not a good idea to have lazy writes if you do not have an UPS.
– i would be great not to have stops for cache rebulding. the cache should update continuously and be always available.
right now i’m using eboostr with the flash memory and the other tool with the ram caching and lazy writes and it’s a big difference. if eboostr would do what i enumerated earlier it would provide a much better user experience and i’d be in love with it (and have no reason to go vista :) )
ps: using windows xp pro sp3 32bit
Dec 08, 2008
Well, in the meantime you could just create an exception to those files (*.sln,*slo).
Dec 08, 2008
I know the product that you are talking about :) Yes, you are right–it is working with physical sectors and not file-based.
1. Lazy writes. We had a discussion about this. eBoostr architecture does not allow adding such functionality for now. There are two many changes required. So, not in the version 3 definitely.
2. After a while when the cache is filled optimally rebuild process goes almost instantly. Continuous cache update will add a lot of hard disk activity and I think a quick update of the cached file is useful in rare situations.
Thanks for the suggestions, we will definitely consider them for future versions.
Dec 09, 2008
if you know what i’m talking about then you have been doing you homework. :)
1. i myself i’m a programmer and i realize that lazy writes is a brand new story for eboostr. eboostr does not touch writes as i understand. only helps reads. i believe this would be an improvement almost in every working scenario. in my case it surely would make a lot of difference.
2.i must say i’m not really happy with the way that eboostr handles cache rebulding. at first it takes ages to build the first version of the cache (especially when using a rather large flash). and on further rebuilds it is never instant. i’d like to be able to choose to start from scratch and eboostr adding files on the fly as they are requested. as it is now the cache rebuilding is too slow and takes the cache oflline.
in the case when one has constant hdd activity but not too intense (eg. torrents), the cache rebuilding seems to never occur or occur rarely. if you wish i could study the behaviour and provide some data. this i think a different story altogether.
thanks for taking notice of my post and answering. i’m only doing this for making eboostr better (as the maniac in me finds it usefull) … and of course for the free license. :)