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[CruelCow]

My Guess: Because many badly written programs exist which might expect stuff at c:/Users, but not program needs to access the page file directly.

[Power]

But there are already OS internal junctions to catch those badly programmed applications (for example there is a hidden junction from Documents and Settings to the Users folder under Win7, incase some XP apps are trying to access that), why not just do the same for the Users file? Infact you can do pretty much exactly that when moving the files manually. I couldn't, but allegedly it works.

But seriously, guys. RAM Drives? Since I can't use all my RAM, because I'm supposed to have a page file, can't I waste a part of RAM for a RAM drive?

[DeadlyAvenger]

But seriously, guys. RAM Drives? Since I can't use all my RAM, because I'm supposed to have a page file, can't I waste a part of RAM for a RAM drive?

Then you can put your page file on that!

[Naftman]

I suppose a RAM drive can be useful... Don't know for what though. Maybe a game that generally has slow loading times ?

Actually, would that even be possible ?

Doesn't matter to me, with my SSD, everything loads like a blitzkrieg.

[Zarf]

Ramdrive shmamdrive.
I'm using FancyCache atm, which is in free beta, it's awesome. You set a portion of your RAM to use as cache and it will intelligently prefetch data into it. Even better, all write operations are cached in RAM, and you can set the amount of time between flushes. You can set the size of chunks to write out too, so it can package lots of small operations up into one large sequential operation to best suit a raid stripe size or an SSD. It's great for SSD's, since writes are cached in RAM it also keeps track of any modifications to that cached data so less actually has to be written to the SSD. On my laptop it's saved me about 30% (15GB) writes over the past 6 days.

Where it gets even cooler is that you can also use an SSD as level 2 cache, so you can have windows and your games installed on a mechanical drive, run the program and it will fill the SSD up with stuff automatically, as well as using RAM as level 1 cache.



Desktop is doing even better, since I had enough ram to use a 2GB drive, as opposed to the 800MB drive i set on my laptop.

[DeadlyAvenger]

Sounds interesting Zarf - but what security do you have...if for example your PC crashes before it has written the cached data to disk?

[Zarf]

Sounds interesting Zarf - but what security do you have...if for example your PC crashes before it has written the cached data to disk?

You can set the interval between write flushes, I use 5 minutes atm, which is an amount of work I am pretty ambivalent about losing.  Any document work I do is kept in the cloud using Google Docs, which saves very regularly. You can also trigger manual write flushes whenever you want, or simply disable the deferred write system if is vital that no saves be lost.

The longer the interval between flushes, the better your hit rates and quantity of data written to disk etc. Naturally anything cached in L2 on an SSD will survive a crash.

[CruelCow]

How much RAM do you have that you can sacrifice 2GB?

[Brahms]

doesn't windows automatically use spare ram as cache?

[CruelCow]

Why do we need another cache scheme since Windows OS has already implemented a file-system level cache?
Some applications bypass the file-system level cache.
Windows caches all data, while FancyCache can cache on behalf of a specified volume/disk in which users are interested. Given same size of system memory, the latter has a higher hit-rate.
FancyCache can utilize the OS Invisible Memory on 32-bit Windows as a cache medium.
FancyCache can utilize SSD(Solid-state Drive) as a cache medium, as ReadyBoost does.

[Zarf]

How much RAM do you have that you can sacrifice 2GB?

8GB. I used to have a 2GB ram-disk anyway, but this is a much better solution.

On my laptop i'm using an 800MB cache as I only have 3GB RAM. Will likely upgrade that at some point.

[Finaldeath]

Tempted to try that RAM cache beta thingy; but I'm keeping my page file; main reasons are large RAM-hungry games - Ultra settings of Dawn of War 2, the Total War series, and some other odds and ends use a lot of active RAM (when I am also running of course all the other apps I want to in the background!). I did try without one; but frankly didn't notice any difference at all in anything, boot times to loading apps.

No, it doesn't get above 4% (of 8GB) much of the time but it's a good safety net and essentially Windows won't ever use it for any real data in most cases with enough RAM anyway, it's clever enough about that. BSOD is not a great thing to happen because you disable a paging file either which is my main worry seeing it creep up VERY rapidly using some games and having other apps open, well over the 6GB used marker, and beyond

I did move it off my SSD though; saves some writes to it.

Oh and you can't store a page file on a RAM disk (apart from it being a stupid idea in the first place); Windows needs a place to put it before such a disk can be created by drivers etc. etc. - at least as far as my testing and understanding from other RAM Disk tools I've used.

[DeadlyAvenger]

Zarf - do you have any info on exactly what kind of performance improvements you're getting from this?