How to load a whole program into RAM?

[Epsil0n00]

So, I have a grip of RAM (1gb) at my disposal. I am wondering if it would help the performance of some games and graphics apps such as Photoshop if the whole applications were loaded into RAM. What do you think--would this result in a performance gain?

Second question is how would one go about loading a whole app into RAM? I only want these apps loaded when I start the application, and purged when I close the apps. Is this possible? It is a good idea, or really not necessary? What are you opinions for this "loading-apps-into-ram-n00b"? THanks!

Epsil0n

 

[singh]

Not a good idea.

 

[Epsil0n00]

mind risking an explanation...
"son, don't do drugs... they're no good."

 

[cnhoff]

You could use a ramdisc, but i don't think, this would help performance considerably, because the most critical parts of an app are loaded into Ram anyways and you would lose Ram for the system and app usage.

 

[jfall]

The problem with loading any program into ram is that it will be gone when you restart your computer. I have used ramdrives in the past for smaller applications. For example, I setup a ram drive and set the path of my Internet Explorer cache to it, so all the cached pages are on the ram drive and load super quick.. then when I restart my computer it is all clear and it never gets cluttered up

 

[DaveSimmons]

the most critical parts of an app are loaded into Ram anyways

Exactly. Windows already does this for you. Delays in games and PhotoShop are from reading / writing data files (and in extreme cases temporary memory allocations) to disk not the program itself. Also, Windows and your hard drive already do caching of disk blocks so some of them are kept in memory even without using a ramdrive.

Given 1 GB of memory, your next step would be to get a 7200 RPM / 8 MB buffer hard drive (like WD special edition) for installing games and photoshop data to. You can keep your operating system and PhotoShop program on the existing C: drive, since the extra speed doesn't matter as much for those files which are only read once.

[ ed ] not sure whether you'd want to move the PhotoShop "scratch disk" to the new drive or not, but I'd assume so.

 

[Shagga]

You could I suppose create a RAM drive and then assign your swap file to this new Drive. It guess it would be faster but I'm not sure you would notice that much.

 

[Nothinman]

Why don't you just work on getting faster drives? I can't think of a single application I run that takes more than 1s to start.

 

[Epsil0n00]

I have one of the faster IDE drives around (or at least it was a year ago)... it is an IBM deskstar (death-star) 60gxp. They benchmark near the top of 7200 HDDs... though it may help to have a drive with a large buffer, like the WDspecial edition. I am not complaining about speed... it is running nicely and my apps load fairly quick... I just thought since I had a ton of RAM that maybe I could put it to good use.

DO you think that the WDSE would allow faster access to data than the 60gxp? What differences do the large buffers make? I have read that the higher platter density on the deskstar series are what allow for the fast access of these drives... how do western digital drives compare?

 

[jonmullen]

This side includes benchmarks for both the WD SE and your deathstar 60gxp. The WD is wins easily in all the benchmarks. As far as why it is faster, I believe that the platter is even denser than your 60gxp plus the 8mb catch means that more requests hits data in ram catch instead of having to search the disk giving faster overall proformance.

As for RAM drives, I usually like to have atleast 2gb before I mess with them. I have set up database servers where the data file is on the ram drive and stuff like that to greatly increase speed. Now before anyone flames me for putting a database file on a ram drive, I used a program that writes the RAM drive back to the HD between requests. That way if the system does lose power at most you have only lost the last few entries.

 

[rbayer]

Originally posted by: Shagga
You could I suppose create a RAM drive and then assign your swap file to this new Drive. It guess it would be faster but I'm not sure you would notice that much.

Ummm... what would this accomplish? Windows won't dip into swap space until you run out of regular RAM anyway.

Example:
1)You have 1GB of RAM. Windows has 1GB of RAM to work with.
2)You have 1GB of RAM. Windows has 500MB of RAM + 500MB of swap space stored in RAM.

In both scenarios, Windows has 1GB of super-fast memory. Moving the swap to a ram drive would just make Windows have to think harder about where memory locations are and Windows typically doesn't do well with the whole thinking thing.

 

[Shagga]

Originally posted by: rbayer

Originally posted by: Shagga
You could I suppose create a RAM drive and then assign your swap file to this new Drive. It guess it would be faster but I'm not sure you would notice that much.

Ummm... what would this accomplish? Windows won't dip into swap space until you run out of regular RAM anyway.

Example:
1)You have 1GB of RAM. Windows has 1GB of RAM to work with.
2)You have 1GB of RAM. Windows has 500MB of RAM + 500MB of swap space stored in RAM.

In both scenarios, Windows has 1GB of super-fast memory. Moving the swap to a ram drive would just make Windows have to think harder about where memory locations are and Windows typically doesn't do well with the whole thinking thing.

True. I was going to mention that Photoshop uses memory very well anyway and you can set this within the preferences, therefore creating it's own cache anyway. A cache in RAM is faster than on your hard drive.

 

[Nothinman]

DO you think that the WDSE would allow faster access to data than the 60gxp? What differences do the large buffers make? I have read that the higher platter density on the deskstar series are what allow for the fast access of these drives... how do western digital drives compare?

I can't really say because I don't keep up on IDE drives much, my machine is all SCSI160. I can say though, I have a 15K RPM drive with 8M cache and it flies, it can do ~50MB/s steady, not burst, which is amazing so I think the extra cache helps a good bit.