I was wondering the same thing, this was very useful information.
Maybe the forum admins have a backup/cache copy?? Until then, I have gathered what I could from replies to this thread and from memory. The original title "Speeding up Sighthound - SSD, RAM Disk and NTFS Junction" also provides some direction.
Please note that this is a high-level overview and NOT a step-by-step guide, but there is enough information here to implement this solution if desired. If time permits (and it probably won't) I will update the guide with more details at a later time.
Overview: The goal is to move that folder to RAM because of the constant I/O generated by the video streams to this folder by using a RAM disk, and then redirecting Windows to use the RAM disk instead of the local drive.
The folder that should be moved to RAM is below (see
this article for details).
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C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Sighthound Video\videos\tmp\
The original post suggested SoftPerfect RAM Disk, however it is no longer free for the current version (v4.x) so instead use version 3.4.8 which is still free (
link here). Wasn't sure about the download site, virustotal results
here. 1GB was used for this setup based on the number of cameras, FPS and resolution. Each installation might be different depending on these variables. Once created, format the RAM disk (must be NTFS) and assign it a drive letter. This example will use 'R:' for the drive letter.
** Turn off all cameras within Sighthound and shutdown the program prior to the next step. **The next step is to create a hard symbolic link ("directory junction") pointing to the RAM disk 'R:'. Deleting the 'tmp' folder was required prior to creating the link; your results might be different. Google provided
these instructions, which resulted in this command for creating the hard symbolic link:
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mklink /j "C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Sighthound Video\videos\tmp" "R:"
If the RAM disk isn't an NTFS volume it will return the following error (as was discovered the hard way):
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Local NTFS volumes are required to complete the operation.
Launch Sighthound and turn the cameras back on. Under 'Options' uncheck the 'Run Sighthound Video at system startup' so that Sighthound doesn't load before the RAM Disk. Go back to SoftPerfect RAM Disk and under 'Tools' and 'Automatically Starting Applications' add in Sighthound so that it will load *after* the RAM disk is created.
Last but not least, navigate to the RAM Disk (R:\) and notice the folders have been re-created and now reside on the RAM Disk (and thus in RAM). All done!
