[AMD] Test drive AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk - Page 2

Originally Posted by hollowtek 

I still don't really get how this works very well. So basically if I installed a game on my RAMdisk, it'll be loading up significantly faster than an ssd?

Originally Posted by timma100 

BTW it doesnt matter how much ram you have Windows will always make and use a paging file.. Because its a jerk

Originally Posted by steezebe 

That's an interesting idea to use the ramdisk as your pagefile. Any reason NOT to do that?
Also, Does this decrease ram lifetime?

Originally Posted by steezebe 

That's an interesting idea to use the ramdisk as your pagefile. Any reason NOT to do that?
Also, Does this decrease ram lifetime?

Originally Posted by tompsonn 
Now what happens if we move the page file to a RAM disk? Lets stick with our crappy system of 1GB of RAM and a 2GB paging file (min/max). Already, we can't put the paging file into a RAM disk! There isn't enough RAM! Okay, so lets make our system a little more modern with a 64-bit OS, we'll give it 4GB of RAM with a 2GB paging file. The total commit limit is 6GB. Let's pretend we have all of that available commit (impossible in the real world, but this makes it simple for the explanation).

The 2GB paging file is now on a RAM disk which is 2GB in size. The RAM disk driver has reserved 2GB of virtual memory. Windows has said "yes, I will reserve this memory for you for some time in the future".
Note that reservation alone does NOT contribute to commit usage, but in the case of the 2GB page file (because the page file is always completely allocated), the RAM disk is definitely using (committed) all of that memory it asked for/reserved. Its commit charge on the system as a whole is 2GB. The amount of system commit available is now only 4GB.

Note also that there are other memory usages that don't contribute to system commit either, but they are beyond the scope of this thread.

Let's say you fire up "HugeMemoryHogApp.exe", which at start up tries to allocate 3GB of virtual memory and touches/uses/commits it all. This succeeds, and brings our system commit down to a mere 1GB. What the hell, I had 6GB system commit available and only ran that one application which committed 3GB of memory, I should still have 3GB! Ah, but you see, the RAM disk has committed 2GB of its own to store the page file... in RAM! So effectively it is like having no page file at all. Without the page file you'd have 4GB total system commit, and that big allocation of 3GB brings system commit down to... guess what, 1GB (we've seen that number before, haven't we)!