RAMdisk - XP Pro SP3 32-bit Machine with 3GB Ram

[DaveLembke]

There is an application that uses mySQL on a Windows XP Pro SP3 system with 3GB Ram. Was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on using RAMdisks Pros/Cons? Any suggestions on which RAMdisk solution to go with. Microsofts is limited to 32MB which wouldn't help much, but a freeware one can be set up to 2GB in size.

According to this link it appears that it would help with large databases.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/73385/boost_performance_win_xp_pro_ramdisk/

I was thinking that if I could allocate 1GB of the 3GB RAM to act as a Virtual Hard Drive I could drastically speed up some database operations which currently perform lots of Read/Writes thru the process. I was thinking that if I could perform all the Read/Writes in a Virtual Hard Drive in a RAMdisk, that I could relieve the physical hard drive of this burden and have the final result of the process then write to the hard drive in the end.

This system is part of a point of sale system which receives updates to up to 90,000 UPC's as information changes, the problem is that thru this process it appears that it writes for every single change to the hard drive which creates a Read/Write condition instead of just a write of the changes. So I was thinking that the RAMdisk could be used to hammer the changes out in Ram, and then perform a single write of all info to the physical drives that are running as RAID 0. The database is about 400MB in size according to the size of the daily backups from SQL Dump. So I am thinking that if the entire database is written to RAMdisk and then all processes performed against it in a 1GB virtual disk space, that I could then have an end process that copies an exact copy of this database then to the physical hard drives.

This system is powered thru a UPS so odds of a power interruption are very rare. If there was no power protection a RAMdisk would be a catastrophe ready to happen as for when power is gone all data is gone in RAM.

Was also thinking of going with a SSD, but why not just use system Ram to perform this quickly with RAMdisk, and System RAM is faster than a SSD to access info.

[Allan]

Pretty much the only reason for using a ram drive is for a large, data intensive application. It seems like that's the situation in your case. Give it a shot and see what you think. You can always go back to not using it if it doesn't seem to work to your liking.

[DaveLembke]

Went with testing this RAMdisk on my spare computer at home first.

My Hardware when testing is:
 
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 running at 2.4Ghz
2GB 533Mhz DDR2 ( single-channel )
160 GB IDE HD C:
Running on Windows 7 32-bit

Testing with RAMdisk FreeWare solution from this location:
www.arsoft-online.de

TEST RESULTS WERE EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE with RAMdisk as shown in pic after graphed benchmark of RAMdisk + IDE HD + USB 2.0 Thumbdrive

*Going to test further with this. I made a 810MB RAMdisk. Only issue I see so far is having to format it after every reboot. And it does not support NTFS, only FAT32 works so far. At first I thought this would be just a solution for this database project. Now though I can see so many uses for this if it didn't have the 2GB limitation such as copy your entire game to RAM for instant loading everything without wait time and lag from drive. A system with 16GB RAM and say 12GB of it able to be RAMdisk'ed could make for some sweet gaming..LOL ... so now on the hunt for games in my collection that can run within say a 2GB Hard Drive Space that have load times etc to see how they run on RAMdisk.



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[jason2074]

Found this link, Primo Ramdisk.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/purchase.html

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for the suggestion on Primo Ramdisk. I ended up trying out DataRAM Ramdisk Version 4.0.0 and its free to use up to 4GB in RAMdisk capacity. The AR Ramdisk that I tried I had bugs with it keeping the formatting on reboot for large capacity.

 DataRAM Ramdisk 4.0.0 has been stabile through testing, with hammering it with jobs and reboots to try to see if it will act up. One benefit of DataRAM Ramdisk is that it allows you to store information on the RAMdisk, which is then written to your physical drive on shutdown. On start up, it repopulates all the information from this image file to RAMdisk so that data is not lost on shutdown. This causes windows to appear as if its slower to boot up, but its because before the desktop appears its populating the RAMdisk from the image file on startup. Once the image file has been pushed to RAMdisk windows desktop is up and quick.

A test process writing changes to database use to take 4 minutes 37 seconds of constant drive activity on this test database, and the RAMdisk trimmed that time down to 36.5 seconds. If I had a faster CPU/RAM combination it could be increased in execution speed faster than 35 seconds to completion.

Very happy with the results and will be buying this program since free use is home use and not corporate. So to be legal I will buy a copy and unlock the RAMdisk beyond the 4GB freebee limitation.