Hi to all,
Can someone share some experience regarding expected speed gain to plotting with adding 128 RAM to my system? Currently on Windows, with 2 x 980pro NVMEs, on AMD Ryzen 5900X I make 35 min for a plot. I think I did it under 30 min when I was on Linux. Now I have an option to buy 128gb of RAM and do the plotting. Of course, all with MadMax ploter. What speed gain should I expect?
I have the same CPU and with 256 Gb RAM with Ubuntu 20.04 I get a plot in about 26 minutes. I suggest you don’t use two NVME Raid 0 and XFS filesystem. Use only one and EXT4. Use only 12 threads. I think you will get similar times I get. Suggestions in mad max plotter discord are not accurate. At least for me and some friends.
Ok, now if I understand well this, I can get less speed gain with mu 128Gb memory, something like between your’s 26 min and mine’s 35 min? Is 28-30 min per plot real with 128Gb? This is important to me simply because I will have to spend 500EUR on 128 Gb per PC and I am making calculations whether this is reasonable or not. If I finish plotting in 10-15% less time, will I earn that amount of money by farming or not, that is the real question here.
Да, но так я не буду носить SSD и использовать их для других работ, например для редактирования видео и т. д. 
Обычные SSD что ли? Да их хер сносишь. Но как тебе сказали выше разницы особой во времени ты не выгодаешь. Да и куда торопится, место на винтах для плотов кончается быстрее чем все остальное )
I thought you have said you had 128 Gb RAM and you will buy 128 more to get a total amount of 256. Initially I had only 128 Gb and if my memory doesn’t fail setting swap over 128 Gb I got similar results. You can set swap memory in one of you 980 pro. The problem is that Samsung 980pro get burn extremely fast. If money returns are enough for you or not is not a question I can answer. At this moment I’m farming and holding. By myself and with some friends. I think this crypto has future. But… who knows.
The reason I used RAM was performance but also to save on degradation of NVMEs.
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I think plotting speed has always been over rated. There are few with enough means to plot faster than they can buy storage.
I would suggest that this be the basis of your calculation. Are you really in that much of a hurry?
If your potential farm is large enough and/or still growing then the answer is yes, but for most, there is little need to plot faster.
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I am also running a 256 GB setup, but decided to plot entirely in RAM. It is slightly too short, so I setup my swap (512GB!) on an SSD (Firegate 510). The combination of ramdisk + swap felt a bit heretic. In the end, I plot in 22 min. with 12 threads and monitor about 10GB written to the swap per plot (through smartctl). The server is running very smoothly, no SSD will be eaten and the configuration is very robust (no process killed due to out of memory). After all the ploting, the RAM will be put to good use as disk cache and the SSD will still be fresh as new.
A motherboard with 8 memory slots is needed though…
Same processor, 128GB DDR3600, using ramdisk for temp2 and an enterprise nvme for temp1.
24-25 min per plot (12 threads)
It makes sense if you intend to plot a lot (~1PB) in the long term. In terms of speed, not much to gain.
Well, if I compare your numbers for RAM plotting with mine, it is almost 10 min quicker, which is close to 1/3. And since I am close to 1PB, more like 720Tb plus some USB drives, it makes sense to switch to RAM plotting. But on the other side, it is also good idea to spent those 1000 EUR in HDDs rather in RAM. Maybe buy the RAM, plot the files and than sell it to buy more HDDs is the best strategy.