* On Tuesday, July 22 2008, Miernik wrote:
That's why I care about size - because RAM is about 25$ per GB now, so keeping the whole GHC in RAM costs 3$ wasted RAM space, and also power consumption (electricity cost) of the RAM chips. 3$ is not a lot, but it's also not nothing, 3$ here, 3$ there and I waste a lot of money. And money is time, so I want to waste less time, waiting for my applications to load from disk, by keeping it all in RAM all the time, and having no disk besides of RAMdisk on the machine.
You can save more space, if your filesystem copied to ram is compressed using squashfs+aufs, like how livecds do it. Using gzip compression you halve the size of the filesystem, saving you $$! So, xmonad and friends will take about 85M, or $1.50. I have set up a system like that, and it is more useful in that I can spin down my hdd indefinitely, than the faster program startup time, since the programs I frequently use are started with xmonad.