worth to invest in 16GB DDR3 for Ramdisk?

[Cerb]

If I limited my RAM to 6GB I would close my browser and not run a VM while playing a game.

Better option: have more RAM, and leave it running.

 

[zir_blazer]

16 GB of RAM for a RAMDisk is too low currently for games (Specially MMORPGs), that usually are at over 10 GB each. 32 GB are more appropiate for this. Too bad that currently they aren't as cheap as they used to be 6 months ago.

In all my experience, Windows is either retarded or got mental deficiency when it comes to RAM usage. Whatever it is, manual tinkering should almost always provide better results that a automatic pilot with down syndrome.
What you use the RAMDisk for, is to preload to RAM anything you want to use that you also want to FORCE into RAM to not have any sort of slowdowns, shuttering, lag, whatever, the first time that data gets used, due to it being loaded mostly on-demand. I wrote tons about this for a contest, you may want to read it.

I have just recently adquired 32 GB of RAM (A pair of these). I could setup a RAMDisk on good old Windows XP to use via PAE, but scores, mainly random 4 KB and IOPS, are too low. Maybe I could get better results with another RAMDisk Software, and much better results when I migrate to 64 Bits.
So far, I have successfully used it to get my Bitcoin client blockchains up to date with, as the last time I even touched that was 6 months ago. That thing is a RIDICULOUS DISK THRASHER, always generating constant activity and noise like if my HD was crunching all day long. The Bitcoin client load times are also ridiculous long currently, while in RAMDisk it was several times faster. Indeed, I had to copypaste 10 GB it back to the HD after finished, but I prefer to heavily use my Hard Disk during a few minutes that all the day long.
Where it didn't shine was loading times in League of Legends, it wasn't really faster that my Hard Disk. It could be either due to the very low 4 KB and IOPS performance, or because LoL isn't very portable and also reads data from the HD, as there was HD activity while loading when there should have been none. Should try other games.

RAMDisk are useful, but they're for niches. If you want top of the line performance at any cost, you can't beat a RAMDisk. It also has some important downsides you should consider.

 

[Cerb]

In all my experience, Windows is either retarded or got mental deficiency when it comes to RAM usage.

Neither, really. It just assumes it will end up low on RAM, so is rather proactive about pushing idle pages to swap, and conservative about loading them back, once they've been expunged from RAM (note to anyone this is new to: Windows makes copies of pages in the PF, then when it needs RAM, it can freely clear the RAM those used to take up, with no page file activity right then). But then that RAM gets used for file cache, instead of re-populating what was pushed to the PF (by not prioritizing pages, it can result in suboptimal performance, including but not limited to stuttering and audio glitches).

With 32GB total, you can fit a good bit in a RAM disk, and also still have plenty for Windows' file cache, today, for almost any desktop uses (16GB is just more of a cost/benefit sweet spot, with RAM prices rising).

 

[zir_blazer]

Neither, really. It just assumes it will end up low on RAM, so is rather proactive about pushing idle pages to swap, and conservative about loading them back, once they've been expunged from RAM

Exactly, and that is why Windows is retarded, because no matter how many resources you give it, it fails to scale up as it should. I have been with Windows XP all the way from a K6-II with 160 MB RAM, 640, 2, 4, and now, 32, and the behaviator is always the same: Always priotizing freeing up RAM, no matter how much you actually have.
The behaviator that you describe makes perfect sense on one decade ago machines with very low RAM like my K6-II from the time WXP was released, as by aggressively making copies of the data in RAM to the Pagefile, if you wanted to open something new, it would just safely overwrite the RAM with the data from the new application instead of having to use the HD both to move unused data out of RAM to Pagefile to make some free space in RAM, and THEN load the new program data. And that is the reason why it doesn't scales well. It has a single behaviator, that it would use on both the low end systems of year 2001 systems, and machines with 2 or 4 GB that were commong when WXP SP3 was released, too.
After I upgraded to 640 MB RAM in my old Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino, I was annoyed that if I left my machine Idle during some hours, everytime I wanted to maximize something, it would lag to open them and had a lot of HD activity. This ended after I figured out that by disabling the Pagefile, I would force all open applications to just stick to RAM, with no further HD usage, and specifically, delay to maximize again unused things just because Windows likes to send them to Pagefile. That was in 2003, and never looked back. I still didn't touched a Windows Vista/7 machine, so I can't comment on them, but even up to WXP SP3, its memory management capabilities when you give it big resources lacks common sense.

 

[Cerb]

It does the same in Windows 7, but not nearly as badly. With Vista and newer, it caches well, like Linux does, which is awesome. That alone makes it better than XP, too. XP does some basic IO caching, but Vista and 7 will keep GBs of files in RAM, hardly touching the disk, if the load is mostly read-only, like game session loading.

Since MS is only just now, and sluggishly, getting IO priority implemented, I don't have much hope it will change any time soon, though aggressively putting your PC to sleep can be a way to not give it that idle time .

 

[FelixDeCat]

16 GB of RAM for a RAMDisk is too low currently for games (Specially MMORPGs), that usually are at over 10 GB each. 32 GB are more appropiate for this. Too bad that currently they aren't as cheap as they used to be 6 months ago.

In all my experience, Windows is either retarded or got mental deficiency when it comes to RAM usage. Whatever it is, manual tinkering should almost always provide better results that a automatic pilot with down syndrome.
What you use the RAMDisk for, is to preload to RAM anything you want to use that you also want to FORCE into RAM to not have any sort of slowdowns, shuttering, lag, whatever, the first time that data gets used, due to it being loaded mostly on-demand. I wrote tons about this for a contest, you may want to read it.

I have just recently adquired 32 GB of RAM (A pair of these). I could setup a RAMDisk on good old Windows XP to use via PAE, but scores, mainly random 4 KB and IOPS, are too low. Maybe I could get better results with another RAMDisk Software, and much better results when I migrate to 64 Bits.
So far, I have successfully used it to get my Bitcoin client blockchains up to date with, as the last time I even touched that was 6 months ago. That thing is a RIDICULOUS DISK THRASHER, always generating constant activity and noise like if my HD was crunching all day long. The Bitcoin client load times are also ridiculous long currently, while in RAMDisk it was several times faster. Indeed, I had to copypaste 10 GB it back to the HD after finished, but I prefer to heavily use my Hard Disk during a few minutes that all the day long.
Where it didn't shine was loading times in League of Legends, it wasn't really faster that my Hard Disk. It could be either due to the very low 4 KB and IOPS performance, or because LoL isn't very portable and also reads data from the HD, as there was HD activity while loading when there should have been none. Should try other games.

RAMDisk are useful, but they're for niches. If you want top of the line performance at any cost, you can't beat a RAMDisk. It also has some important downsides you should consider.

Dataram Ramdrive, which is what I use, has been tested to perform the best. For XP the only thing I could get working properly (consistently startup with r: \, etc) was Gavotte ramdisk which had been modified by someone back in 2008 to work beyond a particular limitation the 1999 version had.

http://reboot.pro/topic/4064-gavottes-rramdisk/

But for Vista, 7, or 8, Dataram works best. To run drives over 4gb you have to purchase a license.

 

[zir_blazer]

Dataram Ramdrive, which is what I use, has been tested to perform the best. For XP the only thing I could get working properly (consistently startup with r: \, etc) was Gavotte ramdisk which had been modified by someone back in 2008 to work beyond a particular limitation the 1999 version had.

http://reboot.pro/topic/4064-gavottes-rramdisk/

But for Vista, 7, or 8, Dataram works best. To run drives over 4gb you have to purchase a license.

Most RAMDisk Software I saw allows you to do a 4 GB RAMDisk for free, but not bigger than that, that is why Dataram is discarded.

Gavotte RAMDisk is what I'm using currently. My version is actually later than that one:

ChangeLog:
1.0.4096.5 通過卷標查看是否使用高內存
1.0.4096.5 修正部分ASUS主板兼容問題
1.0.4096.4
1.0.4096.3 加強初始化清零
1.0.4096.2 ramdisk過大導致NTFS格式化映像文件無效
01.01.2008 support >=4G ram under 32bit windows (UsePAE=1)

I saw two RAMDisk Software benchs, this one and this one. On the first one Gavotte scores good on 4 KB randoms, through there are other Softwares that do twice than it. However, what system it was used in isn't stated, it could be with the 64 Bit Driver version. On the other one, a W7 32 Bits system (That doesn't mention if it doing the PAE workaround), Gavotte instead comes out last with random 4 KB performance similar to a HD. Horrible.
Mine is around SSD levels. But it falls short to what a RAMDisk should do. I don't know how much of a performance penalty PAE brings, but maybe another RAMDisk would do better than Gavotte. It should be free for any size, and 32 Bits PAE capable. From all the ones I checked, only Gavotte did that.

 

[willomz]

Isn't 4Gb plenty if you are just using it for temporary internet files?

 

[zir_blazer]

Isn't 4Gb plenty if you are just using it for temporary internet files?

Who says that I'm using it for that? I shoved into the RAMDisk an entire MMORPG - on 32 Bits WXP SP3.

 

[john3850]

A while back I used FancyCache with two ssd and a 4gb ramdrive.
The info I was using came from saved games on my pc with the average size
of 10-14mb each till now this was the fastest load times I have ever seen.
FancyCache and the ramdrive only seemed to make a difference when I had
huge amounts of data to be moved and made very little difference in every
day use to me.
My ie browser and pagefile share a 4gb ramdisk.