Page File in RAM

[SUOrangeman]

RamDiskNT claims to support it.

-SUO

 

[Nothinman]

They also say things like this:

While there are some situations where it could be desirable (even necessary) to place the pagefile on a RAM disk, keep in mind that you rarely win by taking RAM away from the operating system for a RAM disk to be used to host the pagefile (in principle forcing the system to page more).

Simply put, what this means is that you have set aside too much memory from the non-paged pool for the RamDisk NT disk and you are starving the system for memory from the non-paged pool. This can cause applications and drivers to fail and may make your system unstable or even unbootable.

Putting the pagefile on a ramdisk is one of the dumbest things you can do, and not really something I'd trust on a system I actually wanted to use.

 

[Abzstrak]

I have to agree.... sounds like a really dumb thing to do.

 

[Zoltarc]

I like the idea but I think the issues it would have would out weight the good points (if there are any)

 

[Nothinman]

All you do with that is fsck with the VM, it's made to page out when memory is low, so if you put the pagefile on a ramdisk you only make it get to low memory faster. And you have to make the VM work extra hard once it starts paging because it has less memory to work with and when it swaps it's using more memory.

 

[Mrburns2007]

Heard it can be beneficial for people who have a lot of memory.

 

[Nothinman]

A ramdrive can be, although I don't think it is 99.9% of the time, but putting your pagefile on it is just down right dumb.

 

[AndyHui]

I agree...placing the page file in RAM is counterproductive and kind of defeats the purpose of having the pagefile in the first place.

 

[Nothinman]

and kind of defeats the purpose of having the pagefile in the first place.

Not kind of, it totally does. A pagefile is used to free physical memory for other uses, if you place the pagefile in physical memory the VM can't do it's job properly.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Hope no one got too riled up. It was NEVER my intention to suggest putting virtual memory in RAM. I just know that this question has been asked here many times. I'm just providing someone's answer.

I don't use a RAM drive at all. However, I would consider the pagefile-in-RAM situation if I had well over 512MB of the good stuff. I mean, we all know that Win9x/ME prefer 512MB or less out of the box. While I didn't research the Win9x/ME version of the same tool, I do wonder if RamDiskME can use any RAM over 512MB for virtual memory. After all, the OS isn't going to really use it otherwise. I would use the same argument with WinNT/2K/XP, again provided that I have more RAM than sense.

-SUO

 

[Raspewtin]

i have heard the page file has other purposes beside provided extra VM, and helps the issue of RAM fragmentation. why not just disable VM all together instead (aside from the reason i just mentioned)? I have a gig of RAM trying to figure what to do.

 

[Nothinman]

i have heard the page file has other purposes beside provided extra VM, and helps the issue of RAM fragmentation

It depends on the VM implementation, but using a pagefile to move stuff out of main memory to get bigger, free contiguous blocks isn't bad idea except for the disk churning you'd notice.

Why not just disable VM all together instead (aside from the reason i just mentioned)? I have a gig of RAM trying to figure what to do.

You can't disable VM, any modern OS is tied to it too closely. You could try to disable the pagefile tough but MS' VM requires a pagefile. NT 4 doesn't boot without one, Win2K and XP both create a variable size one if you boot without it setup. You can't get around it.

You could run Linux or a BSD and run with no swap space, but that's not recommended either.