[AccessD] Solid State Disk performance

I wish I could do this with MapPoint and Access or Excel.

Further, I would like to do multithreaded, asynchronous processing
even if I have to open multiple app instances.

Perhaps .Net will be of some assistance in this area ...
if I can ever climb so high.

-
Michael R Mattys
MapPoint and Database Dev
www.mattysconsulting.com
-
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jwcolby" <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com>
To: "Access Developers discussion and problem solving" 
<accessd at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 9:11 AM
Subject: [AccessD] Solid State Disk performance


>I have a pretty specialized application where I need a ~2 gbyte "ram disk" 
>to hold some files that
> are continuously accessed by a third party program.  The problem was that 
> my virtual machines would
> not recognize an "external" (on the host machine) ram drive, plus it just 
> sucked up memory.
>
> I had purchased a 4 gbyte hardware ram disk i-Ram and it worked, but it 
> was limited by the fact that
> it was "only" 4 gigs and that it used the old SATA 1 interface.  As a 
> result it "only" achieved
> about 125 mbyte per second access.
>
> When used with a single Virtual Machine running this application, it would 
> work blazing fast,
> processing about 4-5 million records / hour, however when I would try to 
> access the i-Ram with
> multiple virtual machines, performance on each would drop down to under 
> two million records / hour.
>  It would work, but the performance on each machine would be about 1/2 of 
> the performance when only
> one machine accessed the i-ram.
>
> Recently the Solid State Disks have had tremendous performance increases 
> as well as literally a new
> controller etc.  To make a long story short, I bought one:
>
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393
>
> to see if it would fit the bill for my ram drive.  I now have two virtual 
> machines running this
> software and both of them are running as fast as when using the old I-Ram. 
> 4.8 million records /
> hour on one VM (with two processors assigned) and ~4 million per hour on a 
> second VM with just a
> single processor assigned.
>
> Next up is to set all the VMs to use only a single processor and try to 
> get three VMs working
> simultaneously.
>
> These Solid State Disks have limitations, particularly when trying to 
> WRITE back to the disk, but
> this specific application only writes the files once per software update 
> (every two months) but
> continuously READS the data while performing this process.  Thus for my 
> application, this thing is a
> very solid win!!!
>
> The i-Ram was a good idea but they never continued to advance the hardware 
> and it has become almost
> obsolete now.  I paid about $250 for the i-ram hardware plus 4 dimms, for 
> 4 gigs of ram disk.  The
> SSD was about $125 for 30 gigs of memory, plus it is about twice as fast 
> for reads.
>
> Very cool!!!
>
> -- 
> John W. Colby
> www.ColbyConsulting.com
> -- 
> AccessD mailing list
> AccessD at databaseadvisors.com
> http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd
> Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com