Re: [Gimp-user] Tweaking performance

[GSR - FR <famrom infernal-iceberg com>]

Hi,
rob antonishen gmail com (2011-11-15 at 1105.59 -0500):
> > I think USB2 will be horribly slow, so no point of adding such drive. And,
> > I hope that somebody will correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that
> > GIMP uses /tmp that much if at all. What you really need is more RAM and a
> > fast drive for the swap partition.

eSATA would do. If some kind of RAID0 can be done, even
better. Multiple swap partitions with equal priority should balance
the operations, and for data partitions he would have to use MD, LVM
or similar systems.

> Throwing out another thought -  can gimp temp and gimp swap be set up to
> use a ram based filesystem?

Yes, look in preferences, you can configure where you want the files
to be written; so point to a RAM based FS there. Another trick would
be using symlinks to redirect the directory structure (useful for apps
that do not allow configuration). Linux tmpfs is backed by swap, so it
could hit the disks anyway.

A different matter would be if tmpfs would compress contents (not
supported AFAIK), using RAM more efficiently; otherwise it would just
copy data in memory and not improve anything. So it would be worth
looking into the rather new zram system, maybe it can be used instead
of tmpfs for this.

GSR