I agree that putting the swap file on a ramdisk doesn't make sense for a 64-bit OS. However, if one has 32-bit WinXP, then Windows can only "see" the first 3.5GB of RAM. If one has more RAM, say, 9GB, the RAM above 3.5GB is completely wasted by WinXP. However, using a program such as SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus, one can use the memory above 3.5GB as a ramdisk - and putting the swap file up there makes a tremendous amount of sense (again, on 32-bit XP, not 64-bit Win7).
superspeed ramdisk plus 12 36
Putting the pagefile on a ramdisk is a ridiculous idea.You have to understand that only a fraction of total paging will involve the pagefile. Most paging will be with executable and other mapped files, and a pagefile in RAM will do nothing to improve this performance. And thanks to the reduced system ram available there will be more of this paging. The result is that pagefile access will be faster but overall paging levels will be higher with a reduction in performance.
Bottom line, while it makes sense no matter what to have a ramdisk below 4GB and save useless disk access for temp folder and programs caching, it seems much preferable to install more than 4 GB, memory price being what it is, in both 32 (with PAE enabled hardware) AND 64 bits systems and move the swap file there.
My main system has a 8GB ramdisk on XP/32 and this has proved useful. It's quite trivial to setup and I must say the only program that gave me a hard time is google chrome whose installation/update strategy is hard on the tweaker.
You can think of a lot of useful use for ramdisks apart from these ; in my case, audio samples to retrieve from disk on live applications : put them there at bootup time (painfully slow) and get lightning fast access to multiGB libraries. But this is way off topic :)
I also run Google chrome with the flag "-user-data-dir="R:\ChromeTEMP" so it stores temp files on the ramdisk. This will cause it to forget your settings. But since I use the sync feature it didn't effect me much. After the initial sync everything was back to normal. And skyrim loading screens are shorter after linking to copies of some files on my ramdisk.
As for temp files, moving those to a ram disk should increase their access speeds, though make sure that you won't need anything in there to persist through a reboot/crash and that the ramdisk driver loads and creates the ramdisk before any applications or the system needs to use the temp folder.
There is 3rd party software out there for creating a RAM disk in Windows 7 and allocating your temp files to it. The free version of this software ( -and-services/software/ramdisk) allows you to create up to a 4GB RAM disk. That should be more than adequate for most things, but if you want more space, you have to pony up $20.
There is 3rd party software out there for creating a RAM disk in Windows 7 and allocating your temp files to it. The free version of this software: -and-services/software/ramdisk allows you to create up to a 4GB RAM disk. That should be more than adequate for most things, but if you want more space, you have to pony up $20.
Better Yet: Store brower cache and all temp files to a small(256MB) RAMDISK. Then create another ramdisk around the same size, install your firefox on it, and enable the ramdisk software to save to 2ndary HDD on shutdown and load from HDD on startup. Crazy fast.
With these benefits and limit, RAMdisk can be used to store frequently accessed yet less important temporary data to speed up the system performance, such as swap space for virtual memory, temporary files used for programs such as Internet Explorer, BT client, P2P eMule, compression utility, translation software and etc, frequently accessed data from a database or used to hold uncompressed programs for short periods. From privacy point of view, ramdisk is also a working drive for decrypted version of encrypted document, as all trace of the data will be wiped and deleted once power off.
1) Microsoft 32bit systems like XP have a limit on how much RAM they can utilize.2) Get (www.superspeed.com/ Opens a new windowdesktop/ramdisk.php Opens a new window) Ramdisk Plus for $34.95 (otherwise you're throwing money out by not using your extra RAM anyway :P)3) If like me, you have 8GB RAM, the BIOS should register around 8192MB.. 1MB allocated to BIOS, 2900MB for Windows.. that leaves 4-5GB available to set as a Ramdisk - eg. Z:\* In Ramdisk Plus you have to allocated 'unmanaged' RAM otherwise it will try to use the RAM Windows is using.4) Open System Properties (right-click My Computer on Desktop) --> Advanced --> Performance [Settings] --> Advanced tab --> Virtual Memory [Change] -->Click your Hard Drives and check "No Paging File" then "set" .. Click Z:\ (Ram Disk) and choose Custom Size -- Initial Size 5000, Maximum Size 5000 (can't be bigger than your Ram Disk) or choose 'System Managed Size'* When you exit it may ask you to restart the computer. You can do this after step 5.5) Start -- Run -- Regedit [open] goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE --> SYSTEM --> CurrentControlSet --> Control --> Session Manager --> Memory Management --> [doubleclick] ClearPageFileAtShutdown and change option to "1" and click OK. The reason being the RAM will be purged when you power off, and there's no point with the system thinking the Pagefile will be available cached at boot.You can set Z:\ to be used for temporary files, like Winrar, Firefox, Photoshop etc. It's up to you to decide how big the Swap File should be, if at all you want to use it. I just did this the other day, and the performance increase is amazing. And I'm using my extra RAM that all the [i]experts/i Opens a new window said I 'couldn't'.
I don't have exactly what you're looking for, but I'm now using a combination of Ramdisk and DRAM ramdisk. Since this is Windows, I have a hard 3 GB limit for core memory, meaning I cannot use too much memory for a RAM disk. 4 GB extra on the 9010 really rocks it. I let my IDE store all its temporary stuff on the solid state RAM disk and also the Maven repository. The DRAM RAM disk has a battery backup to the flash card. This sounds like an advertisement, but it really is an excellent setup.
Your OS will cache things in memory as it works. A RAM disk might seem faster, but that's because you aren't factoring in the "copy to RAMDisk" and "copy from RAMDisk" times. Dedicating RAM to a fixed size ramdisk just reduces the memory available for caching. The OS knows better what needs to be in RAM.
I searched for a ready made script for quite a while, because I didn't want to waste a lot of time on writing my own ramdisk-rsync-script. I'm sure I would have missed some edge cases, which would be quite unpleasant if important code was involved. And I never liked the polling approach.
Vmtouch seems like the perfect solution. In addition it doesn't waste memory like a fixed size ramdisk does.I didn't do a benchmark, because 90% of my 1Gig source+build folder were already cached, but at least it feels faster ;) 2ff7e9595c
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