Wild and crazy idea

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austin.texas
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Wild and crazy idea

Post by austin.texas »

I have an idea for a program which would preload programs and files into memory so that they would be instantly accessable.
This would work approximately the same as the Startup programs list, but would not startup, just load into memory behind the scenes. So you would boot in the normal way, with the normal programs started, but after that your OS would load the programs you normally use and the documents or spreadsheets that you normally use into memory. You could have a configurable list of the programs and files you want, and you could configure it for how much ram you want to allocate for that function. I would happily allocate 4 GB of my 8 GB ram for that.
It would be similar to the preloading of pages that you can do with a web browser, behind the scenes - except to ram. It could transform flying saucer drives into a system that is faster than SSD, in some cases.
There could be a program or distro out there that I am not aware of, which does this. I would love to hear about it, if there is. There are the ones like Precise Puppy which load the entire OS into ram on boot, but that is different. That increases the boot time, and does not load documents or spreadsheets.
I already know how to load the entire live Mint iso into ram, and I love how fast that runs - amazingly faster than DVD or USB (but you have to wait for it to load...)
I think if a function like that were added to Mint, it would help to elevate Mint above all the others - IMHO. I am not a programmer, so I can't contribute much more than the concept...
Thoughts ?
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Monsta
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Re: Wild and crazy idea

Post by Monsta »

https://packages.debian.org/jessie/preload
adaptive readahead daemon

preload monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.

Note that installing preload will not make your system boot faster and that preload is a daemon that runs with root priviledges.
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