Once we have super fast reliable internet we’ll likely have the whole computer as a service. We’ll just have access terminals basically and a subscription with a login, except for the nerds who want their own physical machine.
Given the digital literacy of many “regular people” (e.g. my father, and seemingly every other of my friends), the idea is appealing. Especially, as most of them don’t care about privacy. Give them decent availability, and they will throw money at you. And if you also give them support, I will, too.
It’ll never be fast enough. An SSD is orders of magnitude slower than RAM, which is orders of magnitude slower than cache. Internet speed is orders of magnitude slower than the slowest of hard drives, which is still way too slow to be used for anything that needs memory relatively soon.
A SATA SSD has ballpark 500MB/s, a 10g ethernet link 1250MB/s. Which means that it can indeed be faster to swap to the RAM of another box on the LAN that to your local SSD.
A Crucial P5 has a bit over 3GB/s but then there’s 25g ethernet. Let’s not speak of 400g direct attach.
It will crash as soon as it needs to touch the swap due to the relatively insane latency difference.
For those too young to remember, the A:\ drive was for the hard 3" floppy disks and B:\ drive was for the soft 5.25" floppy disks. The C:\ drive was for the new HDDs that came out, and for whatever reason the C:\ drive became the standard after that.
wait, didn’t some tech youtubers like LTT try using cloud storage as swap/RAM? afaik they failed because of latency
This guy used ICMP data payload as a hard drive. It kinda worked.
I remember using ICMP data to bypass my high school’s firewall. TCP and UDP were very locked down, but they allowed pings. It was slow though - I think I managed to get a few KB per sec. Maybe there’s faster/fancier firewall bypass methods these days. This was back in the 2000s when an entire school would have a single OC-1 fiber connection.
I wonder if there would be a speed boost by setting 2 gdrive as raid 0 for off site backups
So is pretty much all of the cloud services the average user already subscribes to. People still use them though.
Agreed. This is especially bad, though, because if it’s compromised they basically have hardware-level access to your machine. Unless you’re using encrypted swap, and I’m not sure how standard that is.
Obviously you should set up device mapper to encrypt the gdrive device then put the swap on the encrypted mapper device.
Once upon a time, Google offered unlimited drive storage as part of some GSuite tiers. They stopped offering it a while ago and have kicked most/all legacy users off of it in the past few months. It was glorious while it lasted 😢
Guess they ran everyone out of business that they needed to, so now the premium features get yanked and your choice of alternatives is curtailed. Hooray for enshittification.
Even better:
Free cloud storage that doesn’t require an account and provides no limit to the volume of data stored
