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RAMdisk on XP 32bit - brainstorming!

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f0dder:
Yes, superspeed (and another which I forgot the name of) can use >4GB memory on 32bit systems, since it does PAE magic. XP itself can do this as well, but it's disabled in the client versions of Windows.

Pagefile on ramdisk = lame. If you've got enough ram, simply disable the pagefile altogether.

I've put my firefox profile (and disk cache) along with a few other often-accessed things on a ramdisk, and it does make my system seem slightly snappier - before, if I had heavy disk I/O, firefox could stall a bit when loading new pages - not so anymore.

Nod5:
I tested Cenatek Dataram RAMDisk Beta V.3.5.107: Got a blue screen of death 10 seconds after starting a ramdisk! I think the software firewall was the cause because after disabling it things worked fine.

Startup time for Firefox portable 3 from ramdisk / harddisk: 2 / 6 seconds. But after the first start Firefox is cached in system memory so the starting it from the harddrive is just as fast thereafter (until something else takes its place in the cache I guess)

f0dder: that makes sense. Once I have upgraded to more RAM I'll setup things similarly:
- disable pagefile completely
- place programs I often start (but don't keep running all the time) on the ramdisk. (Dataram RAMDisk already has built in support for loading/saving RAMDisk contents on system startup/shutdown. But I'll test and compare the other programs too. What ramdisk software are you using?)
- experiment with using the ramdisk for FlashGet downloads

f0dder:
SuperSpeed ramdisk - but I'm on the lookout for an alternative... for whatever lame marketing reason, I'll have to get a new license when I move from XP to Vista/Win7. And the 64bit version is almost twice as expensive as the 32bit >_<

I've set %TEMP% and %TMP% to point to the ramdrive too, which occasionally causes trouble (lame installers), but as a whole is nice.

I haven't moved the firefox program files to the ramdrive, because it doesn't give that much extra speedup - but keeping the cache and the profile there is nice. It's noticeable once firefox's .sqlite files grow big and fragmented :)

4wd:
Just gave Gavotte a quick test and it looks like it does indeed use the space above 3.5GB, (or 3.25GB in my case).

Quick test:
1) Edit boot.ini to add the /pae switch.
2) Merge the ram4g.reg in the archive - do this first, there's a reason.
3) Run the ramdisk.exe program to install the RamDisk.

If you're using PAE then the name of the drive, (default R:), will be 'RamDisk+PAE'.  If you remove the RamDisk and then reinstall it again, then you will lose PAE mode, (the drive name becomes 'RamDisk'), because it wipes out all it's registry entries.  So you'll have to merge the ram4g.reg file in before you install it again.

My available RAM before creating a ramdisk was ~2770000 out of 3405228 according to TaskManager, I made a ramdisk of 1GB using PAE and my available RAM dropped by only 256MB to around 2500000 - the other 768MB being the part XP32 can't access.

I copied 1GB of files to it and the amount of available RAM stayed at ~2500000.

I then changed the size of the ramdisk to 768MB using ramdisk.exe and the name of the ramdisk changed to 'RamDisk-PAE' and the system got back 256MB.

I copied ~700MB and the system still had it's original ~2770000 out of 3405228 available, the RamDisk being completely in the PAE area this time.

I think I've found a use for that unseen 768MB :)

SuperSpeed ramdisk - but I'm on the lookout for an alternative... for whatever lame marketing reason, I'll have to get a new license when I move from XP to Vista/Win7. And the 64bit version is almost twice as expensive as the 32bit >_<-f0dder (May 10, 2009, 07:45 AM)
--- End quote ---

Maybe you should give Gavotte a look, however, be warned that the 64bit version is twice the price of the 32bit version  ;)

f0dder:
I don't feel comfortable running the Gavotte ramdisk - it doesn't seem to have any official site, nor to be supported...

I wonder why there aren't any (decent) opensource ramdisks around? I would think that it's a relatively simple thing to implement the basics, especially considering there's (afaik) a sample limited ramdisk in the NTDDK. PAE memory on 32bit non-server systems might be tricky, and save+restore contents might also have some complications, but... meh.

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