RAM Drives......

S

Scouse

Guest
Just had a thought.

Does anyone/has anyone configured XP or 2000 with a RAM drive and whacked their swapfile on it?

I've got a new PC with a gig of RAM coming along and I want to increase swapfile performance without RAIDing the fucker up....

Was thinking of a 500meg ram drive with the swapfile sitting on that??
 
T

Testin da Cable

Guest
was thinking about this ages ago. there was some logic about it not working iirc but as I said, iirc. :)
 
S

Scouse

Guest
Had a thorough search through technet and can't find owt apart from a thing saying you can't do it under Win3.11 :)
 
T

Testin da Cable

Guest
do it then :)

and remember to post what happens!
 
S

Scouse

Guest
Don't know how in XP :(

Not got my machine yet either :(



But when it comes - it'll be a BEAST :)



(As soon as I've disabled all the crappy XP services - like Portable Media Serial Number Checker! :rolleyes: )
 
S

StrangelyBrown

Guest
This was on The Register a while ago...

The Register did an article a while ago about internet anonyminity (big word for this time of night) that contained a couple of links to set up a ram drive on Win 2000.

It's quite a long article and you do have to scroll down a bit...

Regs,
Strange
 
X

xane

Guest
Originally posted by Scouse
Was thinking of a 500meg ram drive with the swapfile sitting on that??
Click to expand...

Is this a bit pointless ?

The swapfile is used for when you run out of RAM, this is more likely to happen if you reallocate a block of RAM for a RAMdisk.

Best swapfile performance comes from not using it at all, by acquiring more RAM.

XP does use the swapfile for other stuff, such as dumping the RAM core in the event of a crash, but on the whole it is far better to allocate maximum RAM to running programs and thus reduce the need for swapfile access in the first place.
 
S

(Shovel)

Guest
Not true. Even on my system - 768 meg of RAM, I have about 300 meg Swap File usuage, but I still have 470 Megs free in memory. The thing is though, I think you'd want to reserve about 70 meg to 1gig for swap file - because it can get very big and the last thing you'd want is for it to crash when it fills up.
 
D

danger

Guest
Xane's saying if you disable the swap file... XP will still use the swap file if you have a fuckload of ram if don't tell it not to afaik

Out of interest how much ram do you reckon you need to improve performance by diabling the swap file... are we talking around a gig?
 
E

Embattle

Guest
You can disable it from 512+ although there are a few other commands to help reduce the usage of the swa[file, certain programs like Adobe products require a swapfile.
 
D

Dimebag

Guest
Re: Re: RAM Drives......

Originally posted by xane


Is this a bit pointless ?

The swapfile is used for when you run out of RAM, this is more likely to happen if you reallocate a block of RAM for a RAMdisk.

Best swapfile performance comes from not using it at all, by acquiring more RAM.
Click to expand...

This is only true under linux and possibly *nix. Under linux (gentoo) i found that it used ALL of my available memory before creating or using a swapfile. However, you try turning the swap file off under windows and watch the machine die no matter how much memory it actually needs.

I have no idea why anyone can put 512 MB or 1Gb ram into a windows machine and it only ever seems to use a very low percentage of it in the actual windows environment (not in games etc). Crappy coding I guess, who'd intentionally rely on the slowest part of the pc the whole time.

Dime
 
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