I was looking around »www.speedguide.net yesterday and found this interesting post about setting up a RAM disk for Internet caching:
http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?s=f2575a5bf49ae4bbaf42a91f6feb1d3b&threadid=32931
It's pretty simple to do and really boosts web page displaying. My speed according to testing has not improved but my pages are displaying much more quickly now.
Also, I used their TCP/IP analyzer which said my parameters were optimized for PPPoE but gave some interesting values for the DefaultRcvWindow. It showed 511104 as a possible value which is much larger than the 37720 maximum suggested by the tweaks test at dlsreports. After correctly installing the vt386 fix (I had to manually copy it to c:\windows\system), DrTcp held this value in my system.
Once the RAM drive is correctly set up you can tell IE to cache to that drive (Tools/Settings). All the "stuff" that is automatically downloaded when you visit pages, like image files, will be cached to the RAM drive which is much faster than writing to the hard disk. Only drawback is that cookies for forums like this one are temporary so you have to log in each time you reboot your machine and run an Internet session. Very small price to pay for the speed increase!
These two modifications have noticeably improved my web pages display time as well as resulted in generally faster download times for the file downloads which I often use for testing.
Note:
At first, the information on setting up the RAM disk seems confusing, but it's really quite simple. Just download the xmsdsk program and put a call to it in your autoexec.bat file to create the RAM disk. Then you need to download the registry patch and import it (I believe it's called "cache.reg"😉. This registry file points the IE cache areas to your Ram drive, so make sure that you edit it and change the drive, which is set to "I:\", to the letter of the RAM drive you create in your autoexec.bat file.
That's pretty much all there is to it!
Give it a try if you'd like. You won't be disappointed!
http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?s=f2575a5bf49ae4bbaf42a91f6feb1d3b&threadid=32931
It's pretty simple to do and really boosts web page displaying. My speed according to testing has not improved but my pages are displaying much more quickly now.
Also, I used their TCP/IP analyzer which said my parameters were optimized for PPPoE but gave some interesting values for the DefaultRcvWindow. It showed 511104 as a possible value which is much larger than the 37720 maximum suggested by the tweaks test at dlsreports. After correctly installing the vt386 fix (I had to manually copy it to c:\windows\system), DrTcp held this value in my system.
Once the RAM drive is correctly set up you can tell IE to cache to that drive (Tools/Settings). All the "stuff" that is automatically downloaded when you visit pages, like image files, will be cached to the RAM drive which is much faster than writing to the hard disk. Only drawback is that cookies for forums like this one are temporary so you have to log in each time you reboot your machine and run an Internet session. Very small price to pay for the speed increase!
These two modifications have noticeably improved my web pages display time as well as resulted in generally faster download times for the file downloads which I often use for testing.
Note:
At first, the information on setting up the RAM disk seems confusing, but it's really quite simple. Just download the xmsdsk program and put a call to it in your autoexec.bat file to create the RAM disk. Then you need to download the registry patch and import it (I believe it's called "cache.reg"😉. This registry file points the IE cache areas to your Ram drive, so make sure that you edit it and change the drive, which is set to "I:\", to the letter of the RAM drive you create in your autoexec.bat file.
That's pretty much all there is to it!
Give it a try if you'd like. You won't be disappointed!
