Would a RAM Drive Page File Speed up Performance ?

[Soopafresh]

A Product Such as this http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm

Set the RAM drive up as D:

Set your PageFile in XP to swap to D:, same with web browser cache, etc.

OR, would your overall system performance be better by NOT allocating that RAM for an emulated drive? Scenario - A machine with 3GB of RAM running XP Pro - Use 2GB for the OS and 1GB for a RAM Drive, or no swap file at all and the entire 3GB for the OS and apps?

[mats.hogberg]

Doesn't sound like a good idea. The pagefile is used when physical RAM is insufficent. Reducing physical RAM size to use 1/3 as "spare" doesn't make sense to me.

/Mats

[draganong]

You could set the system variables like TEMP and the simmilar to point to this RAMdrive, rather.

[bevills1]

Judging by Bart PE which runs in ram drive it is extremely slow taking 3 to 4 minutes to boot and load everything compared to only a few seconds for normal Windows boot. Everything runs noticeably slower in Part PE as well.

[Morse2]

Hi Soopafresh;

I haven't tried the software you linked to, but something like the new hardware IRAM card that Gigabyte has released looks promising for this (it uses DDR memory with up to 4GB capacity and emulates a SATA drive). It's still bandwidth limited by the SATA interface but at least there are no latency issues involved. Just hoping they show up in North America some time soon so I can get my hands on one to find out.....

All the best,
Morse

[cd090580]

You could set the system variables like TEMP and the simmilar to point to this RAMdrive, rather.

Not a good idea to set the TEMP dir to a Ramdrive.

If a setup copies some file to the temp dir and ask to reboot. The files will be deleted before their installation. Dangerous if you try installing drivers.

[Soopafresh]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Might end up with some major corruption if the system crashes.

[akrako1]

My first thought was no, a paging file is only used when you're out of ram, so it would be couter-productive to designate some for a ram drive... but then I reconsidered... I've heard from some knowledgable folks that windows only really uses up to 2GB in ram (unless you're running the 64bit version). Can anybody with a memory-heavy system verify this? If this is true, and if you've got more then 2GB of ram, then converting the excess to a ram drive, and filling it up with a paging file (not temp files), should theoretically speed up performance. Windows' built in memory managing is for sh*t. Memory rarely gets recycled, and paging files are excessively used when you just need a better memory managing system. Maybe in Vista? hahaha.... You can also try investigating some of the 3rd party memory managers. They advertise that they free up extra memory - which will decrease your use of the paging file.

Me... I've only got 1gb memory, and run my os from a 10K RPM SCSI drive... Paging files are split amongst 4 different drives, and is defragmented and optimized to the outer platter edges. Still though, I'll hear windows chuggin' away at the paging file while I shouldn't have enough apps open to eat up all my physical memory.

[JerryB]

A Product Such as this http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm

Set the RAM drive up as D:

Set your PageFile in XP to swap to D:, same with web browser cache, etc.

OR, would your overall system performance be better by NOT allocating that RAM for an emulated drive? Scenario - A machine with 3GB of RAM running XP Pro - Use 2GB for the OS and 1GB for a RAM Drive, or no swap file at all and the entire 3GB for the OS and apps?

Hi,
This is my opinion...
1. pagefile only comes into play whenyou have run out of regular ram!! so it seems like your defeating your purpose by creating a ramdrive and using it for that purpose , the pagefile... if you reduce your regular ram your going to be force to use page file....
2. Now ram drive can provide a big performance boost depending on how your going to use it...
a. If using very large files and your continously going back forth between these files..... getting them from a ram drive is faster than from the hard drive!!
Note: i wouldn't be surprised if in the next few years... the operating system is put into a "radmdrive" type setup.. smile.. sort of taking a page out of the old apple 1/2/3 and cp/m old xt's computers.
b. In some case, althugh requires some work, you can put a whole program in a ram drive... but for most programs there wouldn't be any benefit...
For the avg users it not practical to create a ram drive..... although I can see many situations where depending on applications and files.... it would be big performance boost!

[gadgetguy]

I don't think it's true that the pagefile only comes into play if there's not enough RAM. I have seen page counts in systems that have far more ram than the running applications are using. I haven't been able to come up with a test to properly verify this, but I believe that the pagefile gets used whenever Windows decides a memory block has remained idle "too long".

[JerryB]

I don't think it's true that the pagefile only comes into play if there's not enough RAM. I have seen page counts in systems that have far more ram than the running applications are using. I haven't been able to come up with a test to properly verify this, but I believe that the pagefile gets used whenever Windows decides a memory block has remained idle "too long".

Hi,
That has always been my understanding.... ever since win3.1 that the virtual memory ...swapfile/ page file only comes into play whenyour out of regular ram.... below is driectly from M$ statement on the virtual memory/page file...
..................
"Managing computer memory
When your computer is running low on RAM and more is needed immediately, Windows uses hard drive space to simulate system RAM. This is known as virtual memory, and is often called the paging file. This is similar to the UNIX swapfile. The default size of the virtual memory pagefile (named pagefile.sys) created during installation is 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your computer.

You can optimize virtual memory use by dividing the space between multiple drives and removing it from slower or heavily accessed drives. To best optimize your virtual memory space, divide it among as many physical hard drives as possible. When selecting drives, keep the following guidelines in mind:

Try to avoid having a pagefile on the same drive as the system files.
Avoid putting a pagefile on a fault-tolerant drive, such as a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume. Pagefiles don't need fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant systems suffer from slow data writes because they write data to multiple locations.
Don't place multiple pagefiles on different partitions on the same physical disk drive. ""

[gadgetguy]

That's what I was taught as well, but I used to have a utility that counted and logged hard page faults. On a system that had 1 gig of physical memory, it received page faults while simply browsing. Not alot, but enough to indicate that the desired memory block had to be retrieved from the drive. The whole while the memory usage in Task Manager never rose above 200k, nowhere near enough to be taxing the system. That's why I believe it uses the pagefile for more than just when you're out of memory. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the utility and the computer belonged to a former employer, so I can't go back and check it. The windows utility doesn't seperate hard faults from soft faults, so it's hard to verify anything with it.

[Morse2]

Hi Gadgetguy:

>>>...I don't think it's true that the pagefile only comes into play if there's not enough RAM. I have seen page counts in systems that have far more ram than the running applications are using....<<<

I can confirm that from experience. Here's what Everest Home Edition reports on memory usage of the computer I'm typing this on:

Physical Memory
Total: 2046 MB
Used: 480 MB
Free: 1565 MB
Utilization: 23%

Swap Space:
Total: 6009 MB
Used: 359MB
Free: 5649 MB
Utilization: 6%

Virtual Memory:
Total: 8055 MB
Used: 839 MB
Free: 7216 MB
Utilization: 10%

Notice that "Virtual Memory" is the sum of Physical Memory and Swap Space. In other words, as far as Windows is considered, there is no physical memory - only "virtual memory" some of which is mapped to physical locations and some of which is mapped to HDD space.

Obviously all 839MB COULD be mapped onto physical memory in this system - but it is NOT, thanks to the design limitations of the Windows OS. If this was only an email machine, I would obviously drop the size of my pagefile dramatically to force Windows to use the capacity of the machine efficiently - but since it's a video editor, that's not a good idea.....

Anyway, I personally like the idea of a ramdrive but don't have experience with that software package.

All the best,
Morse

[JerryB]

That's what I was taught as well, but I used to have a utility that counted and logged hard page faults. On a system that had 1 gig of physical memory, it received page faults while simply browsing. Not alot, but enough to indicate that the desired memory block had to be retrieved from the drive. The whole while the memory usage in Task Manager never rose above 200k, nowhere near enough to be taxing the system. That's why I believe it uses the pagefile for more than just when you're out of memory. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the utility and the computer belonged to a former employer, so I can't go back and check it. The windows utility doesn't seperate hard faults from soft faults, so it's hard to verify anything with it.

hi,
I did some more researching, primarily was curious, for the most part didn't really find anything that told me more than I already knew... this website... gave me a inkling that there maybe other things going on, such as the page file is communicating with the ram... it may not be doing anything specific but it seems it always sharing some info related to the ram.... maybe i am reading more into it...
http://kb.iu.edu/data/acwa.html I believe your a lot more knowledgeable than i so maybe some that will make sence to you..

[gadgetguy]

JerryB - From the site you linked:

When Windows NT decides that RAM is so full that the operating system needs more RAM to get things done, the operating system takes a look at the page frames in RAM and decides which of these page frames have not been used recently. Once Windows NT has rounded up all the least recently used page frames in RAM, it writes these frames to the hard disk, in the file called pagefile.sys.

Scary 4 words "When Windows NT decides"

[vhelp]

I have been thinking this same thing for years now, too.

But, me a favor.. perform this test in your setup and see what you get.

I'm going to assume that you are posting this idea based on a consistant
becahavior of a particular application that you use often, and finally,
the thought had accured to you

** before booting into windows, (if possible) locate your .swp file and
delete it.

** plan for a clean (no app running in background scenario)

** now, restart windows, and be sure that nothing else is running.

** next, using an app that will just tell you the filezie of that .swp file,
** example: c:\windows98\dir *.swp
** Note the size, if it is greater than zero.

** Now, as for that app that gave you this idea, start'er up, and again,
** using the step above, example: c:\windows98\dir *.swp
** Note the size, if it is greater than zero.

Now, there is a reason and method to this madness above. IOW, there is a
point I'm trying to make here. Despite what others are saying about the
worthlessness of RAMing your pagefile.. In your given setup and particular
software behaviour, you just might be a candidate for your RAMdriving
idea.

You see, if you notice that your pagefile (sys file) is being writen to,
then you know that (dispite) your internal RAM size, that for some strange
reason, windows is *still* writing to a pagefile/sys file. Something is
causing windows to write, when, even though you have plenty-full of RAM,
windows insists on writing to a pagefile/sys file.

If you do this research (above) you might find clarity. Please consider
my suggestion. In the mean time..

If you want, I have a tiny tool that I use, to check my HDD available space
for when I'm DV capturing on my 4g limit'ed WIN98 setup. But, I could do
a little modify to it to locate exactly, the filename in question, and it
can poll your HDD every some many n seconds (acording to your setting)

Then, you could instruct your windows to start this app at startup, and
see what your HDD ( *.swp ) size is before/during/after tooling around.

-vhelp 3881

[Morse2]

Hi akrako1;

>>>...I've heard from some knowledgable folks that windows only really uses up to 2GB in ram (unless you're running the 64bit version). Can anybody with a memory-heavy system verify this?...<<<

Sort of. Windows allocates a maximum of 2GB to programs and hogs 2GB of memory space for itself when you've got all 4GB in operation (I've actually done this - it's wonderfully irritating). In some ways 3GB seems an optimum in that at least Windows doesn't grab half the virtual memory space for itself. With the really heavy memory machines, you also have to allow for mapping of PCI devices into virtual memory (some mobos support 'memory mapping' in the bios which allows the board to remap some of your memory up above the video memory).

It's more complicated than that though in 32 bit XP - with the /PAE switch set in your startup options, you've got an extra 4 bits of addressability (anybody else remember "himem" - same thing, different name) which carries you on out to 64GB of virtual memory (curiously, if you set the data execution prevention feature on with "noexecute=optin", paged address extensions are also active). However, 32 bit apps will still only be able to directly address 4GB and Windows will only allocate 2GB of virtual memory to a single application (arrgh!). Massive amounts of VM are useful for multitasking as well as for programs like Adobe Photoshop which insist on using the pagefile though.

Sorry for the boredom factor on this post - trying to get XP to "play nice" with high memory machines has been an obsession since last year when I ran smack into the 4GB limit.

All the best,
Morse

[Soopafresh]

Morse - Me too. That /3GB switch in Boot.ini

[whitejremiah]

i've actually used this exact program before...it DOES have it's fair share of uses, but it also DOES slow down your computer rather considerably....i used it to install stuff like DOS games to (since they dont write anything to your registry) to play them for a while and reboot when im done playing them...and they disappear I think that's the only practical use for this program, or if you have a fair chunk of ram, i could see uses for stuff like photoshop and such.......as far as running windows though, i wouldnt advise it, just because even on the 2400xp computer i was running it on, it slowed everything down even making like a 32mb ram drive (this was with 768mb ram, too.....)

[DereX888]

buy more RAM instead
(well gotta use some real OS too instead of XP...)

[Doramius]

buy more RAM instead
(well gotta use some real OS too instead of XP...)

Like WinVista? :P

[DereX888]

buy more RAM instead
(well gotta use some real OS too instead of XP...)

Like WinVista? :P

For that, as one famous person said:
64k of RAM should be enough for anyone... :P

[Doramius]

buy more RAM instead
(well gotta use some real OS too instead of XP...)

Like WinVista? :P

For that, as one famous person said:
64k of RAM should be enough for anyone... :P

He was right, though.................for a 486 that doesn't multitask. :P