Windows page file on a RAMdisk?

manveruppd

manveruppd

manveruppd

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With DDR2 prices so cheap thinking of actually doing something I speculated about roughly a year ago.

Basically, upgrade to 12GB RAM (from my current 4GB). Set up an 8GB RAMdisk. Disable all Windows paging files on my physical HDDs, set up an 8GB swapfile on the RAMdisk. Keep the other 4GB as system RAM.

(Might even try a 5/7GB split if I'm feeling brave)

Any reason why this wouldn't work? If I have enough cash left over for a small SSD I'd buy one to install Windows and a few of my most-frequently-used applications on. I think the combination of loading things off an SSD and using RAM to page to would make it all blazingly fast.

The only thing I'm concerned about is that it might be ridiculously overkill. My reason for wanting to do this (apart from the novelty value:p) is that I'm assuming that Windows will write to the pagefile even when it doesn't need to (that's what I remember reading here anyway). If this isn't the case though, then if I bought that much RAM it would rarely need to swap anything to disk at all and going through the trouble of setting up a swapfile on a RAMdisk would be a waste of time - even using a conventional HDD for it wouldn't slow me down noticeably.

So, would it make a difference or not?
 
Why such a big RAMdisk? If you're set on doing this, with 12GB of RAM, set 8GB as system RAM, and make a 4GB RAMdisk. That'll work out better for you.

Or better still. 2GB RAMdisk. 10GB RAM. You need 64-bit OS regardless of which way you do it. Personally I'd not bother. With 12GB RAM, your pagefile will only be used for things that won't make a difference anyway.



As an afterthought, I do believe there is a registry key that can be set to force all of the physical memory to be used before the pagefile is used. Can't remember what it is though.
 
Windows rarely writes to the page file when it has sufficient ram, so setting up a big ramdrive is just going to increase the chance of paging, and its slower to access ram via a pagefile than directly.

I have 6GB in my system, an SSD boot disk, and a raid0 of old Seagate 7200.10's, and my pagefile is located on the Seagate disks... Very occasionally an app will reserve some space in the page file (and release it when you close the app), but overall 99.99% of apps will use physical ram if available.

For me it wasnt worth the space on the SSD to keep the pagefile there, and I can see no advantage whatsoever in reducing available ram to create a ramdrive and pagefile.

Once option I still consider interesting (but hard to realise these days) is one of those physical ramdisks, and using old DDR memory to make a 4GB ramdrive and put the pagefile on that.
 
No matter what, a page file anywhere is going to be slower than just using RAM. With 12GB of RAM on WIN7, you should not need a RAM disk and you'll have very minimal page file usage anyway.
 
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