3 Apr
2005
3 Apr
'05
1:51 a.m.
Hrm... well, aside from shooting the developers of software that did
something like that, I think it would be better to have a compatibility
flag that would have the OS lie to the application about having a
pagefile rather than dedicating part of ram for a ramdisk to hold a
pagefile.
Like you said, the kernel constantly is trying to free up ram by paging
out memory that is not being used. If you have a pagefile in ram, then
it isn't really freeing memory by moving things to the page file,
instead it is just wasting time moving it from one place in ram to
another and back again, with no benefit. Also because most of the page
file goes unused, a good deal of the ram you have reserved for it will
be wasted when it could be better put to use by the filesystem cache.
It would be better for performance to simply not have a pagefile and
thus not shuffle around ram needlessly. Since the goal of paging is to
free up ram, paging to a ramdisk is self defeating.
Richard Campbell wrote:
I've used several applications that CHECK to see
if the pagefile is
active, if not, they refuse to load. This mostly happens with games.
Early in the beta world of warcraft was like that (even though they
removed the check in later betas/final.) Also, even when you have
'more than enough memory', seldom 'used' data is moved to a page file
when it isn't being accessed. If i have a chance i'll find some links
for you. (mostly Windows NT stuff though, don't have anything on other
operating systems, but then again that's what matters here.)
Windows also tends to act rather funny when you don't have a page file
(keep in mind, i'm using a machine with 3 gb memory. My page file is
on my hd, having one in RAM to me is nonsense because my pagefile is
generally 3-6 gigs and would outgrow RAM very fast if i did that.
Of course i'm not recommending creating a ramdrive just for a page
file, but i'm making it clear that it isn't totally foolhardy.
Phillip Susi wrote:
Royce Mitchell III wrote:
Casper and I want one to improve build times, by
putting certain
temporary files there.
If the cache manager is doing it's job, temporary files already reside
in ram without having to dedicate a portion of it to a ramdisk. If the
cache manager isn't working at least as well with temporary files as a
ramdisk is, maybe it could be improved?