To ram

Can how much of Knoppix is booted to ram be changed? Even though its a live a cd I assume some parts are loaded to ram and others are retrieved from the dvd or cd as needed. A pc with 4Gb or more of ram could handle the complete OS? Maybe? Any ideas on that?
Thanks.

Using a fast USB drive, there is, in my experience, not very much difference between resident programs and programs loaded from the compressed image. This has to do with the development of a lot of factors, making the USB work better and better with time. My personal opinion is that CD/DVD+ "toram" option is simply the wrong way to go. But with 64-bits kernel and 8GB RAM, loading the whole image to ram should work - taking some time, though...
Trying to load parts of the compressed image isn't worthwhile, I think. I strongly suggest people comtemplating more "manual" RAM management - IMHO the combined work of Knoppix and the Linux kernel works very well in this respect try fast USB devices first, USB3 makes a lot of difference too.

I think this may be an IOPS issue. Since my clients boot via pxe, the performance of them is based upon the performance of my tftpboot server.

Loading the whole compressed image into RAM may in some cases actually degrade performance, as the Linux kernel by default applies a very active strategy caching programs in available free memory. Also, persistent store is not compressed, so with, say 3-4GB of that loaded into memory in addition to the compressed image, quite a lot of memory may be occupied.