New 32 Bit Puppys for Low RAM

[amethyst]

I don't normally copy the puppy files to RAM but there is a specific reason why I'm doing it with this machine and more particular because of the huge external hard drive I'm booting from. Now this drive is ntfs formatted and I have lots of valuable stuff on there and do not want to mess with that partition. This drive will ONLY boot from this specific partition and does not even pick up any Puppys on the small linux partition I made. So I'm actually forced to boot from the ntfs partition and the Puppys need to be on this partition too otherwise nothing will boot. Unfortunately this ntfs partition gets corrupted over time which leads to problems. So the best in this scenario is to still boot from the ntfs partition but copy the Puppy sfs's to RAM and not bother with that partition further after boot. That's why I made a small linux partition to run the browser from and save other stuff to. So with only 2GB RAM, it's obvious that I would want to have my puppy files as small as possible therefor the max xz compression. The Fossa Fire (cut-down version of Fossa9.5) which I now use most of the time on this machine is 175MB in total (apart from the browser which runs from the small linux partition). I also use S15Pup64 and Jammy33 sometimes the same way as they are not too big either.

[dimkr]

max xz compression

Computers with little RAM usually also have a slow CPU, but xz is CPU intensive to decompress and a big chunk size makes things even worse. Switching from xz with copying to RAM to zstd without copying improved responsiveness a lot in every old computer I tried.

Copying to RAM can really slow down things, especially if most accessed files are outside of the SFSs. The kernel can use free RAM for cache of frequently accessed files on disk (and skip repeated reading from disk) but copying to RAM prevents this because RAM is "wasted" on SFSs instead.

[amethyst]

max xz compression

Computers with little RAM usually also have a slow CPU, but xz is CPU intensive to decompress and a big chunk size makes things even worse. Switching from xz with copying to RAM to zstd without copying improved responsiveness a lot in every old computer I tried.

Copying to RAM can really slow down things, especially if most accessed files are outside of the SFSs. The kernel can use free RAM for cache of frequently accessed files on disk (and skip repeated reading from disk) but copying to RAM prevents this because RAM is "wasted" on SFSs instead.

Works very well for me and very fast. As I said, i only use this method because of the booting device I'm using. My Puppy's are extremely small so not much of a downside (in fact it's a bit faster when copied to ram). I normally have my Puppys compressed in gzip (when not copied to RAM). Gzip is very light on resources and can be used with all Puppy's new and old and fast enough in my experience.