Using extra memory to improve system performance

The problems of modern OSes

Published on February 24, 2004 By Draginol In Personal Computing

One thing that's a bit frustrating these days is that it's really hard to make good use of system RAM to improve your performance.

In the good gold days of DOS. I could use HyperCache or SmartDrv or some other disk caching program and feel the performance improvements. For instance, in 1992 I had a 386SX with 8 megs of RAM which, back then, was immense. So when in DOS, I'd set SmartDrv to have a 4 meg cache. And when I loaded Windows 3.0, the hard drive barely crunched at all and the system instantly booted up it seemed.

But then I moved to OS/2 and later Windows 2000/XP and disk caching apparently hasn't been a priority with them. And bizarrely, third parties haven't seem terribly interested in this area either. Windows seems to want to do hard drive crunching for anything.

Even if I turn off swapping in XP and stick with my 1 gig or 2 gigs of RAM (depending on the machine) I still hear tons of disk crunching. Why? If I have a gig of RAM for disk caching, I shouldn't hear that hard drive crunch at all when I'm switching between programs. Yet I do.

I have concluded that Windows XP handles memory very inefficiently. I'm looking into various ways to improve performance on my machine through the use of RAM. Any ideas?

Comments

Dan (Anonymous User)

on Feb 24, 2004

when you install the OS you can configure the area of the disk reserved for paging to 0MB, then the computer will only use ram. If you have a bunch of ram you should see some good speedups.

JeremyG

on Feb 24, 2004

There's a way to get the OS to not disk cache at all...looking for reg hack.

JeremyG

on Feb 24, 2004

Here's a few:
http://www.techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

Scroll down to the "memory tweaks" heading.

Draginol

on Feb 24, 2004

Yea but not disk caching is probably even worse in terms of performance wouldn't it?

Also, as I mentioned, I have turned off paging in XP and I still get lots of crunching.

bakerstreet

on Feb 24, 2004

Have you tried Cacheman? Site

It takes a pretty large job for me to get all the way into a gig on my machine. If I do something around poster sized with a printable depth it isn't too hard. I've never really compiled anything large enough on mine to know what commercial development demands are.

I think Everquest is the heaviest game I use and I don't think it uses more than 7 or 800 megs last I checked.

Chris (Anonymous User)

on Feb 24, 2004

What would be really nice is that for those of us who have a 1Gb or two of RAM to create a RAm drive and have Windows cache to that. Talk about a performance boost

Pam Johnson

on Feb 25, 2004

Back in the early years Mac and Dos both have a program called RamDisc or RamDrive (getting old, hard to remember back that far). These were nice little programs where you could specify how much ram would be set a side for programs. Then all you have to do was tell the computer what programs to load into the RamDisc then at this point your application would run basically at the speed you were hoping for in the first place. On the Mac you could set it up to load up at startup, and then load the programs you wanted into the RamDisc after the OS loaded. Again worked great. Then came Win 95, and OS 8. After that they seem to just disappear. Like Brad a few years ago I went looking; sorry nothing. Hopefully someone will fine a RamDisc.

Pam

Pam Johnson

on Feb 25, 2004

Just did a google search, and only found a ramdisc mentioned in the context of Linux. Nothing on CNET either.

Pam

Lucas (Anonymous User)

on Feb 25, 2004

Keep in mind as well that the actual speed of hard drives hasn't increased exponentially like everything else has. That is to say, your 386 could load up the few megs that it needed to run windows 3.0 much more quickly than your current system can load the hundreds of megs needed for xp. On top of that, 3.0 wasn't a stand-alone operating system (it ran on top of dos), so most of the groundwork was already laid down by the time windows started to start.

Nakor

on Feb 25, 2004

I don't think its the starting the OS that Brad's concerned with here. It's the inefficient use of unallocated RAM.

I've got 1GB in this machine. It takes over 10 seconds to remove some 1000 files from a directory and subdirs with a delete command (not an issue with smartdrv.exe in dos

.

When I launch Internet Explorer, why can't it instantly be on the screen? I've got close to 40MB of SVCHost.exe's already. Why not the options for a preloaded IE base to launch easily. Why not a bit of a virtual ramdisk for internet cache?

Yeah, these aren't things you're going to be able to do with a stock XP or 2000 system with 128MB of RAM.

OTOH, with the ooey gooey goodness that is managed code, we may not be worrying about RAM not getting used for a disk cache.

Linux King

on Feb 28, 2004

You should switch to Linux? It's Open Source so you can do things with it that you couldn't with Windows like customize it to your liking and code disk caching right into it!

on Feb 29, 2004

Not everyone is a programmer, Linux King.

Draginol

on Mar 05, 2004

I can customize Windows more completely and more thoroughly with Object Desktop than any Linux guru I know could with Linux.

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