Put the Pagefile in a RAMdisk? (XP 32-bit)

[Stereodude]

So I put a SSD in my HTPC that runs XP (32-bit), and I would prefer to keep the pagefile off the SSD. From what I've read online in XP it's not actually possible to completely turn off the pagefile, so that basically leaves me with the idea of creating a RAMdisk and putting the pagefile on it.

Has anyone tried this? Tips, tricks?

Also, what's the best RAMdisk driver/solution?

 

[ddrueding]

I installed the one that was linked earlier as part of the OCZ SSD performance thread.

Good side: In it's standard configuration, it works.

Bad side: Any attempt to change the configuration, stop the service, or uninstall the product causes a BSOD. My system now also takes 10 minutes to boot.

Not recommended.

Edit: It also only supported <4GB RAMdisks. I'm looking for something that can handle 8GB at least.

 

[Stereodude]

10 minutes?

That's crazy. My HTPC is off most of the time, and I only turn it on when I want to use it. A long delay on start up is not going to be acceptable.

 

[Santilli]

My results are different:

I followed the instructions here:
Download the RamDisk app and install it to your system. Once installed you can either set the Ramdisk to 150MB (if you have 2GB installed memory) or if you run 4GB 1650MB.

From this page:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47244

Using the beta version for free. I set it up as they suggest, and, it's worked flawlessly, except when I tried to increase the size of the Ram disk over the suggested mb amounts, then it did BSOD, and, I had to delete the ram disk, and start over. Both my laptop and my
2003 machine are running a 150 MB ram disk, with a FF_cache on it, and, the rest reserved for pagefile, about 135-140 mb.

Internet explorer caches cookies to the IE_cache, and, that means the pagefile for IE is WAY too big to be on such a small ram disk.

FF seems to cache under 10 mb, and, must put a bunch of files on the hard disk, not sure how that works.

I've noticed using DVD Shrink a HUGE increase in speed. Seems that program uses a bit of pagefile that goes on the ram disk, and, it really speeds it up.

On my laptop, some games, like Tiger Woods 99 golf also speed up, despite the fact that it's 1.25 gigs of ram, now reduced by 150mb, and, with the pagefile in part on the ramdisk.

Browsing in FF are a bit faster and snappier, and, many OS functions seem increased a bit in speed.

Worth doing, but, don't stray far from the recommendations made in that article. If I had 4 gb of ram, I'd certainly like to create a 1650 mb ram disk, and, I'd put a good part of the page file, FF cache, and, I'd use it for Photoshops scratch disk.

By the way, I don't notice much, if any difference in boot or shutdown speeds, but, again, I stayed with the above suggested mb of ramdisk..

 

[Stereodude]

I tried a 100MB RAMdisk using their recommended program on one of my laptops for the FF cache and didn't notice any real change on startup, but it seemed to take longer to shutdown, although it wasn't more than a few seconds.

 

[ddrueding]

I tried to follow their directions, but didn't get past installing it before the above issues occurred. I'm certain this is not the intended behavior . It could be a complication with XP-x64, with having 12GB of RAM, or with the i7 CPU/chipset. No idea, but I wish I could just uninstall it at this point.

 

[Santilli]

My FFCache was under 3 mb, until I started downloading a bunch of stuff. IE's cache quickly, with basic stuff, went over 25 mb.

I find if I keep the cache under 10 mb, FF runs faster.
I notice a difference in speed with 130 mb of pagefile on the ram disk, and, in certain programs, it's a huge difference.

 

[Stereodude]

I've tried a 100MB RAMDisk for the FF cache on two of my laptops, and I'm completely sold on the idea. Both only have 2GB of RAM though, so I'm not going to try putting the pagefile on a RAMDisk. Once my new RAM sticks gets here for my HTPC (currently only 512MBx2), I'll try a larger one for my pagefile.

 

[Stereodude]

I was thinking about this some more, and I can't come up with any logical reason why you would want to save the pagefile on the RAMdisk on shutdown and load it back up on the next reboot. I understand that if you put your Firefox cache on the RAMdisk you'd want to save it and load it during the next reboot, but the pagefile...

Nothing is saved in the pagefile from shutdown to the next boot. In my experience if you delete pagefile.sys Windows XP will just recreate it on the following boot.

Am I all wet here?

 

[ddrueding]

Nope. I have the pagefile pointing to the 2GB RAMDisk that I can't get rid of, and it isn't set to backup/restore. Works fine.

 

[Stereodude]

So then why does it add 10 minutes to you boot sequence?

 

[ddrueding]

No idea. But it was under 2 minutes before. Now I can go upstairs, BS with co-workers, grab a soda, come back, and still be waiting. It's crazy. I'm actually pretty close to rebuilding my workstation just to get rid of it.

 

[ddrueding]

Looking around for RAMDisk software that can handle larger amounts of RAM, I found this.

Extended memory access - RamDisk Plus 9 has a most unique feature. Our patent pending technology can access memory beyond the limitation imposed by a Windows 32-bit operating system! In other words, RamDisk Plus 9 can use "unmanaged" Windows' memory e.g. above 4GB. It can also use the stubbornly inaccessable memory between 3.2GB and 4GB.

For those wanting to keep holding onto XP 32-bit, this could be the way to better performance.

 

[Stereodude]

You can't get rid of it in safe mode?

 

[ddrueding]

Haven't tried yet. Good idea. I'll give it a shot the next time I have 30 minutes to spare.

 

[ddrueding]

You can't get rid of it in safe mode?

Installer service won't start in safe mode (even manually), and that is required to remove it. I can't find where it is starting from to disable it.

 

[Santilli]

IIRC, I set the registry to delete the pagefile at close down. Since it's a ram disk, it doesn't take much time at all to clear, though the memory seems to be reserved on the disk.

To delete the one that was blue screening, I set the registry to delete on shutdown the pagefile, then on reboot, it worked and restarted. I then shutdown the ram disk from the start menu. Then went in and deleted the program.

On reboot, I reinstalled it, but at the recommended levels.

 

[LunarMist]

What is the point?

 

[Santilli]

2003 and XP appear to pick the fastest disk for page file usage, first.
You can, with only about 130 mb, put your entire os kernal in RAM, and, the paged parts of the kernal as well. It appears that a bunch of little page file writes and reads seriously slow down the windows experience. Likewise the difference with a ram cached Firefox.

The HD tach results put reads from the Ram disk I'm using, a beta, at between 1200 and 1600 mb/sec, with O.0 access time on random reads. Also, burst rates are a consistent 755 mb/sec.

Considering the cost of ram, and, the really noticeable increase in speed, until SSD's come down considerably in price, you aren't going to get numbers, or a snappy feeling anywhere close to a fully ram located kernal OS.

I've been doing this since the late 90's, installing parts, or all of the old Mac OS 7-9 onto Ram disks, with spectacular results. If APPLE had half a brain, they would have done what they did with many other 3rd party software solutions: steal it and make it part of the OS. They did, but, their implementation sucked.

 

[Santilli]

OK, I made a mistake. On my 2 gig, 2003 server box, I put a 500 mb ram disk, by accident. I use about 480 gigs for OS pagefile, and, about 20 for FF_Cache.

Helps quite a bit. Snappier, clear that the OS is in RAM, and, that there aren't any real hangs. Also reduced the pagefile overall to 2500 mb, 500 ram disk, 2000 on C drive, raid 0. Wonder if that's why I have wavy lines on HD tach????....

 

[Santilli]

OK, I made a mistake. On my 2 gig, 2003 server box, I put a 500 mb ram disk, by accident. I use about 480 gigs for OS pagefile, and, about 20 for FF_Cache.

Helps quite a bit. Snappier, clear that the OS is in RAM, and, that there aren't any real hangs. Also reduced the pagefile overall to 2500 mb, 500 ram disk, 2000 on C drive, raid 0. Wonder if that's why I have wavy lines on HD tach????....

 

[ddrueding]

I installed the one that was linked earlier as part of the OCZ SSD performance thread.

Good side: In it's standard configuration, it works.

Bad side: Any attempt to change the configuration, stop the service, or uninstall the product causes a BSOD. My system now also takes 10 minutes to boot.

Not recommended.

Edit: It also only supported <4GB RAMdisks. I'm looking for something that can handle 8GB at least.

Following the manual removal instructions in the readme seems to have gotten rid of it.

 

[jtr1962]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why does one need a pagefile at all these days? I've disabled mine in XP ever since I went from 1 GB to 2 GB. At 2 GB it didn't appear to be needed. Now that I have 3 GB I almost never come close to using all my physical memory, let alone needing a pagefile. With RAM as inexpensive as it is these days, I would think a pagefile is a relic of the past. Is there some flaw in this line of thinking?

I can see the value of making a RAM disk however and putting certain apps on it which tend to exhibit heavy HD activity. Even more so if you use that Ramdisk software dd linked to. Very cool that you can actually somehow make use of RAM above 4GB, even with a 32-bit O/S.

 

[Mercutio]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why does one need a pagefile at all these days?.

Windows basically insists on paging sometimes, and if you don't have a pagefile you get all kinds of hilarious, cryptic error messages and random shit breaks.

 

[jtr1962]

If figured it might be something along those lines. So far though I haven't encountered any problems with no pagefile. I guess in the cases you must have a pagefile for Windows to work properly, putting it on a RAMdisk makes a lot of sense.

 

[Santilli]

Judging from the difference, it appears a lot of those pages are small, and, of small quanity, once you get about 1.25 gigs of ram, and above, in XP.

I haven't tried this with any games, other then Unreal Tournament 2004, and, it seems fast, if not faster, then with a normal page file.

My experience is the same as Mercutios, and, I've been trying to put the entire OS in windows into ram from about 1998-2000, when I moved over to 2000 pro. I'd been able, pretty much, to load the entire Mac OS 7-9 onto ram disks with no problems. However, without it, no such luck in Windows...

 

[jtr1962]

I can see the value of making a RAM disk however and putting certain apps on it which tend to exhibit heavy HD activity. Even more so if you use that Ramdisk software dd linked to. Very cool that you can actually somehow make use of RAM above 4GB, even with a 32-bit O/S.

Well, it turns out that 32-bit Vista already has the tools to use RAM over 4GB. They just aren't enabled by default. But doing so might be violating your license agreement. (very interesting article discussing a lot about how Windows accesses memory)

 

[Mercutio]

PAE is a bit of a hack, in that it gets back to doing something not unlike the DOS-land BS of bank switching EMS memory. At some point in the future it's not going to be good enough, just as EMS wasn't. We can say we're going to move to 64-bit before then but honestly, given the direction and acceptance of current and near future Microsoft offerings, I don't know with any certainty that it truly will.

 

[Stereodude]

Well, I got my 2x2GB of RAM for my HTPC. So far I can't get the pagefile to work on the RAM drive.

I've tried it both ways. Saving the RAMdrive at shutdown and loading it at boot, and not doing it. In both cases it creates a pagefile.sys on the C drive despite being set to none for the C drive.

There is a pagefile.sys on the RAMdisk, but the system isn't using it.

 

[Stereodude]

It looks like I'm having the same problem that's described here. Windows isn't loading the RAMdrive fast enough, or before it tries to use the pagefile.

 

[Stereodude]

I was able to get it working by doing the following. I created two bat files. One is run at startup and the other at shutdown by using the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) to tell Windows to use the .bat files.


Createpage.bat
-------------------------------------------------
CSCRIPT "c:\windows\system32\PAGEFILECONFIG.vbs" /Create /I 1500 /M 1500 /VO R:
-------------------------------------------------


Removepage.bat
-------------------------------------------------
CSCRIPT "c:\windows\system32\PAGEFILECONFIG.vbs" /delete /VO R:
-------------------------------------------------


In order to make this all work I had to turn off the memory dump on the system. Otherwise the shutdown script hangs on a y/n confirmation prompt complaining about about not being able to write the memory dump if the pagefile is removed and the system won't shut down. I currently have the Dataram RAMdisk program set to not save the drive on shutdown or load it on startup. Overall, it seems to be working fine.

 

[Santilli]

Well, I tried the acid test: take the Ram Disk away. BIG noticeable difference. I decided I'd reinstall it, and, this time I made it the intended 150 mb, instead of 500. Seems about the same speed, but, my games might have more room...

Have to see how it works out. The pagefile is actually 125 mb, the rest is for the browser cache, which I really notice.

 

[Santilli]

XP Pro, ram disk vs. SSD?

 

[Stereodude]

FWIW, if you go SSD, you probably want to make a RAMdisk too.

 

[LunarMist]

Greg,
RAM disks and SSD are apples and oranges. I've been using RAM disks for about 7 years. While they are very good for certain purposes, they are not a substitute for a fast drive. If you want high performance, balanced desktop system, use a mixture of approaches including the RAM disk. I use X25-E for OS/apps, Velociraptor for files that benefit from high performance, 1TB 7200 SATA drives for general data, and 1/1.5/2TB “green” drives for backups/archives/storage.

 

[Santilli]

Anyone have a list of Ramdisk programs, and, which ones they use, and why?

Thanks

GS

 

[ddrueding]

I bought RamDisk Plus 9.x, mainly because it supported using RAM beyond 4GB on 32-bit OS's (when using 64-bit capable hardware) and that it supported RAMDisks larger than 4GB.