Feasibility of using a Large RAM Disk

[Tokkulmann]

How practical and how beneficial would it be to have and use a large RAM disk? A lot of what I'm about to postulate is a lot of madness I thought of on a whim based on very minimal hardware knowledge and experience so bear with me.

I believe it's gotten to the point where 8GBs of RAM is starting to become the new standard and 12GB and 16 machines aren't too uncommon or expensive.

So if I were to build a new computer with 16 GBs of RAM, would it makes sense to allocate a large portion (maybe 12 GBs) of that to becoming a RAM disk and load a lot of commonly used applications and perhaps a single game onto it?

I haven't had any experience with RAM disks before and only heard about doing this recently, but this was a hypothetical scenario that spontaneously thought of. From what I can understand, making a RAM disk means taking a section of RAM and treating it as if it was a hard disk. Programs are then loaded onto it from hard disk for use.

This leads to programs running and loading very fast since that is the nature of fast memory and this intrigues me. What are the effects of putting a computer to sleep when a RAM disk is setup? I believe every time the computer shuts off, the contents of the RAM disk is also lost so the files need to be loaded on every time, but if I can avoid somehow that would make this setup more viable.

I also assume that having a fast hard drive would be important to actually be able to move files onto the RAM disk. If I had an SSD, would it even be worth doing all of this craziness?

My plan would be to have one large "blockbuster" game with large textures and a few commonly used applications like an office suite loaded onto the RAM disk and then just continually sleep/hibernate the computer, only rebooting for updates when absolutely needed like a system update.

[Geek-9pm]

The theory is good. For piratical reasons it is not often used in a way the user would recognize. The OS,or Operating System, itself manages memory in such a ways as to maximize performance overall. Parts of programs and data blocks are kept in memory by the OS to make it faster to reload the data or programs later in a session.  The user may not even be aware of it.

The point I want to make is that you can add a lot more memory to your system and try to manage it yourself and find that the improvement is not as much as you might anticipate beforehand.

[Computer_Commando]

You could try this out:  http://www.filehippo.com/download_ramdisk/

RAMDisk is the right product for you if you have a disk I/O bound application that is small enough to fit in main memory. RAMDisk is also great for storing frequently accessed data such as temp files, page files and database index files. RAMDisk is freeware up to 4GB disk sizes.

• Speed up Internet page load times
• Control what files and programs are stored into memory (loaded at boot time)
• Create temporary disks for added security
• Speed up disk-to-disk activities such as video encryption and audio ripping
• Accelerate databases
• Reduce compile times

[Salmon Trout]

Surely storing a page file in a RAM disk defeats the whole point of having virtual memory?

Myth - "Putting the Paging File on a RAMdisk improves performance."

Reality - "Putting a Paging File in a RAM drive is a ridiculous idea in theory, and almost always a performance hit when tested under real-world workloads. You can't do this unless you have plenty of RAM and if you have plenty of RAM, you aren't hitting your paging file very often in the first place! Conversely, if you don't have plenty of RAM, dedicating some of it to a RAM drive will only increase your page fault rate. Now you might say "yeah, but those additional page faults will go faster than they otherwise would because they're satisfied in RAM." True, but it is still better to not incur them in the first place. And, you will also be increasing the page faults that have to be resolved to exe's and dll's, and the paging file in RAM won't do diddly to speed those up. But thanks to the paging file in RAM, you'll have more of them. Also: the system is ALREADY caching pages in memory. Pages lost from working sets are not written out to disk immediately (or at all if they weren't modified), and even after being written out to disk, are not assigned to another process immediately. They're kept on the modified and standby page lists, respectively. The memory access behavior of most apps being what it is, you tend to access the same sets of pages over time... so if you access a page you lost from your working set recently, odds are its contents are still in memory, on one of those lists. So you don't have to go to disk for it. Committing RAM to a RAMdisk and putting a paging file on it makes fewer pages available for those lists, making that mechanism much less effective. And even for those page faults resolved to the RAMdisk paging file, you are still having to go through the disk drivers. You don't have to for page faults resolved on the standby or modified lists. Putting a paging file on a RAMdisk is a self-evidently absurd idea in theory, and actual measurement proves it to be a terrible idea in practice. Forget about it."