Article Inspired by Conversation with @Minion-Queen
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
I've heard this from a few people. From the research I've done it never seemed to actually be the case. The only thing that was put into RAM were the objects in the Startup folder and the system services.
It definitely has the sound of an urban legend. Can't figure out why they would cripple the system that way and why there wouldn't be all kinds of confirmation from them if that was done.
You can test it yourself actually... throw a big file onto your desktop and monitor RAM usage... I just did it with the ~5GB Fedora 18 ISO. It used 200Mb of RAM for the copy and then went back down to what I was using before.
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@coliver Actually that could still cause it to cache because of the transfer. Need to reboot to really be sure. But if it doesn't do it in the transfer, it definitely doesn't load it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver Actually that could still cause it to cache because of the transfer. Need to reboot to really be sure. But if it doesn't do it in the transfer, it definitely doesn't load it.
I didn't see that behavior, but you're right that could happen.
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When you read the article and post a question about it, then read down the comments and see it's been asked below. Sigh.
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What's odd, generally with IT stuff there is an answer generally accepted by the community as a whole. Things like RAID 5 is bad. This however has no consensus. Even though it seems to be fairly easy to test.
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@coliver said:
What's odd, generally with IT stuff there is an answer generally accepted by the community as a whole. Things like RAID 5 is bad. This however has no consensus. Even though it seems to be fairly easy to test.
Even worse, is it makes a certain kind of terrible sense. It'd be useful to have a space where you put your working files that's a RAM drive mirrored to physical disk. Write out the changes every 30 seconds or something so you don't thrash I/O on the disk and still get all the benefits of insta-run stuff.
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@MattSpeller said:
@coliver said:
What's odd, generally with IT stuff there is an answer generally accepted by the community as a whole. Things like RAID 5 is bad. This however has no consensus. Even though it seems to be fairly easy to test.
Even worse, is it makes a certain kind of terrible sense. It'd be useful to have a space where you put your working files that's a RAM drive mirrored to physical disk. Write out the changes every 30 seconds or something so you don't thrash I/O on the disk and still get all the benefits of insta-run stuff.
Doesn't the system already kind of do this in a more automatic way? It caches documents/files that you are currently working on? Having a central "RAM Disk" to do this would be gimping the operating system automatic processes.
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@coliver said:
Doesn't the system already kind of do this in a more automatic way?
If it does I'd be interested to know about it. Obviously it does when you open the file, but that's what we're trying to avoid (the comparatively slow disk I/O).
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@MattSpeller said:
@coliver said:
What's odd, generally with IT stuff there is an answer generally accepted by the community as a whole. Things like RAID 5 is bad. This however has no consensus. Even though it seems to be fairly easy to test.
Even worse, is it makes a certain kind of terrible sense. It'd be useful to have a space where you put your working files that's a RAM drive mirrored to physical disk. Write out the changes every 30 seconds or something so you don't thrash I/O on the disk and still get all the benefits of insta-run stuff.
I've been doing that since the Amiga days. Just get an SSD today, though.
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@MattSpeller said:
@coliver said:
Doesn't the system already kind of do this in a more automatic way?
If it does I'd be interested to know about it. Obviously it does when you open the file, but that's what we're trying to avoid (the comparatively slow disk I/O).
You want tiering with an auto-load to RAM disk, I guess?
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@scottalanmiller said:
I had no idea that things on your desktop are automatically cached to RAM. When did they start doing that? It kind of makes sense, give you effectively a RAM disk to use easily, but as many Linux systems throw /tmp into RAM, but without people really knowing this, it is pretty surprising.
The Wallpaper has been for years, Never heard of the desktop itself being in ram though.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You want tiering with an auto-load to RAM disk, I guess?
Y'all get so complicated lol
I'd take a simple folder that's mirrored to disk. Mirroring is important to me because I usually care about keeping what I work with, but like Office's auto-save it could be something basic like twice a minute.
Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day setting up a RAM drive and writing a script. Sigh.
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I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..
That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.
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In similar light to the article's title... I've always heard of the seen words ofa dying business: "We've never done it that way before."
Similar in light to the "That's how we've always done it" -- only different.
Doing things because that's the way they have always been done without questioning it is when that becomes a problem. "That's how we've always done it."
What about this way?
"We've never done it that way before."
Why not?
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..
That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.
But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?
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We've had people do desktop replacements by copying the files over the network \computername\C$ to the new computer (after first login) you don't copy at the user folder level you drill now into each folder, and copy what needs to be. (it's always been done manually to keep bloat down, as some software's will put folders in places). The Documents etc folder is redirected at most companies these days so no need to copy those. Desktop doesn't store the files to ram. So I'm not sure what AJs problem with this process is. It's a fairly effective process really.
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@dafyre said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..
That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.
But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?
No, not necessarily. How do you consider not having web meetings to having them a broken system? Break/fix is a bad assessment of it. most of IT is consultation and design of systems.
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@dafyre said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I'm not sure how much I can agree with this line The job of an IT Professional is to fix, document, and improve. We fix things that are broken..
That sounds more like a Technician. I would say an IT Professional's job is to apply technology to the business process.
But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?
Have to create first, though. All IT has been created, only most has been fixed.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@dafyre said:
But aren't we often applying technology to improve or fix a broken process?
No, not necessarily. How do you consider not having web meetings to having them a broken system? Break/fix is a bad assessment of it. most of IT is consultation and design of systems.
We started with meetings that required everybody to be in a room. Somewhere along the line somebody said, "We can just do this over the phone." Boom! Some (IT ?) folks got together and built a teleconferencing system.
"Hey, we can do this using web cams now!" Boom! Some (more IT?) folks got together and bult a web meeting system that could be used with webcams.
Now, suddenly, IT is responsible for designing, and consulting with the business on how to improve their infrastructure to support said web conferences and meetings. In this setting, nothing was broken. IT Had to consult and design to improve the infrastructure enough to handle the new meeting servers, etc, etc. In essence the whole shebang that involved a lot of IT was an improvement on the process of having a meeting.
I agree that break / fix is a bad assessment, but it does depend a lot on your role in IT as well. I've been in IT at only 3 places, so my business level experience is limited, but I have been doing IT Stuff for my whole life, lol. At my first job, it was purely a break / fix scenario. At my second IT job, it was a lot of break / fix, but also a lot of impreovement, design and consultation with the stakeholders in IT probjects. In my current job, I do mostly design, consulation, and implementation.
