Put Cache on Ramdrive?

It occurred to me that I might improve SL's performance at small expense by installing more RAM (going from 4 mB to 6 mB) and putting the cache on a Ramdrive?

If I did that, could I expect improvement?

Also, would it help to use a Ramdrive instead of a flash drive for Readyboost?

Thanks.

In general SL is too much of a kludge to be worrying about speeding up the cache with a ramdrive. I don't think you would notice any difference.

SL's poor performace comes from the fact that it's having to "stream" the content from the internet. Trying to speed up SL through the cache would be like trying to train a snail to move quickly.

It might make your performance worse since ram drive is volatile memory...ie, its gone when you shut down your pc.

If the cache is used to store objects and textures from your last session, all that will be gone after a reboot and you will have to download a fresh copy of everything every time you reboot.

If the cache is used to store data during the current session, your best bet would be to not use a ram drive, as most caching systems will use all available memory, then start to use the hard drive only as it needs to. When you make a ram drive, you will have less available system memory. Something that you don't want to do is put your swap file on a ram drive... completely redundant. You're much better off to let the system manage it's own memory usage.

As far as Readyboost, I dont think that will work with volatile memory.

But here a snippet I found:

If you have >2GB of RAM, Readyboost is pretty much useless. You can do something else with your USB flash drive.

I've tried putting the network cache on a RAM drive, and didn't see any significant difference. I believe Zolen is right, if your computer has enough memory to do that, it's already using it to cache that data, and doing it more efficiently than a RAMdrive would.

I tryed putting the cache on my 2gig cruzer and it would litterly lock the client up at points. so my advice dont try it

I just get so frustrated with SL, and keep trying to think of something to make it work better.

If you have some additional hard drives on your computer, you can try these tricks suggested by my Resident Geek.

1. Create a RAID 0 array with two or more drives. Only use the RAID for data you don't worry about losing, such as copies of music or videos, or temporary/cache files, because the failure probability of a RAID 0 is the product of the failure probability of a single drive times the number of drives in the array. I put the Windows pagefile and the SL cache on the RAID.

2. Go into System/Advanced and set the Windows pagefile to a user designated size. Make the size fixed, and 1.5 times the amount of RAM in your system (the "suggested size" that you'll see there).

3. Maximize your cache size. Ours is 1.5 GB.

4. Turn off Indexing for everything except your C:\ drive. You can even turn it off for C:, if you don't mind Searches taking a little longer.

5. Go to a Windows "tweaks" site and follow the suggestions there for turning off unneeded services. (NOTE: I take no responsibility for any Weird Shit that may result from this. Only make changes to stuff you understand, and only one thing at a time. System Restore is your friend here, so don't forget to make a Restore Point before making changes)

6. While you're in System (see 2 above), go through your Appearance settings and turn off bells and whistles and pretties you don't really need.

Buy the fastest Nvidia graphics card you can afford.

Enable the advanced menu (ctrl-alt-d) under rendering check the option "run multiple threads".

Jennifer - How about network connection speed? What are you running? I run SL at home on my HP Compaq mini tower with Intel Core 2 3.0 GHZ CPU, Nvidia 8400GS in a PCIe x16 slot, 3GB ram and a 7200 RPM hard drive (paired with a second identical unit in RAID-0). Network is Comcast High Speed Internet at 6meg/second with their booster feature that speeds up FTP (and maybe other protocols) to 20 mbps down in bursts. It runs great!

Other box is my Lenovo laptop, Intel Core 2 2.8GHZ, more than enough RAM but network connectivity is primarily 54MBps(?) wifi to my Netgear G class router. It stinks! Lag is unbearable! When I plug a 100base/T Ethernet cable from my router into the laptop (so I'm attached like the HP Business Desktop with the Nvidia) it is more than acceptable running SL. Check the network, maybe? Hope this helps. Jackie.

If you're on Linux, your system RAM should be transparently used as a buffer cache and if you have enough RAM it will *always* read from RAM. It will write to disk, but it will do it in the background.

On Windows, however, the memory management is not nearly so well managed.

Mac OS X should be have the same as Linux but I still get weird results where it seems to discard buffer cache. I don't understand why. Other Mach-based systems don't do that.

...

On Windows I have an old RAM drive, it's a 4G SATA drive with 4G of actual PC133 RAM and a backup battery. It doesn't seem to help as much as I think it should.

what actually helps a slight bit on a sata drive system is to have 4 drives, like a, b, c, d.
a) OS/programs
b) pagefile
c) temp/tmp/browser temp
d) sl cache & other program caches

in this manner, the data can read/write symmetrically

I am using a Ram Drive on my Notebook wich I use for SL... The Performance boost is not really to mention but there is something that made it all worth... My Harddisc isn't nearly as often used as before... so the temperature dropped by about 10 degrees. Wich is a good thing as my Notebook seemed to be boiling hot after some hours of SL... Thing is in Windows XP you have to safe the ramdisk to disk before you shut the PC down but well...

So for performance it doesn't really bring a lot but for me still worthy

RAM drives, are for most purposes, obsolete. About the only practical use for a ramdisk I can think of these days is a live-CD or to load modules before you've properly booted Linux. Let your OS's memory management system do it's job. By the way, how are you running SL with only 4 millibytes of RAM? (I think you probably meant GB... which letter and how it's capitalized makes a difference in metric, and bit and bytes are metric).



You're probably better off using Readyboost and letting the OS do it's job.

If you switch to Linux, you /really/ won't see any improvement then, since recently used files are maintained in memory as long as the memory isn't needed for more recently accessed files or for programs automatically: a RAM disk would actually cost you performance in this case.

This would explain why I noticed no improvement when I sent my cache to /dev/shm/ .

But in all seriousness, although disk I/O is often the bottleneck for most games, it's not the case with SL, as long as you have a reasonably modern hard drive - especially if you're using SATA. The viewer itself is probably the biggest bottleneck for most modern systems.

gah no (especial not on a windows machine)
why thrash 3 disks at once

A) OS
B) Pagefile (with size specified if used)& all temp and cache files
C) programs, (and maybe stuff stuff from D)
D) data files / media (stick it w/ programs if you don't have the space)

D are items that heavily benefit from Raid 1 (mirroring saves data)
B will heavily benefit from raid 0 (striping speeds access)
A if lost is easier to replace by itself (raid 0 for speed, raid 1 for instant recovery)
C if lost still leaves you up and running and doesn't take data with it. (raid o for speed, raid 1 for data protection)

There is one situation where a ramdrive would make sense. That is if you have more than 3GB of memory and use a 32bit OS. There is a limit off accessible memory, depending on your system somewhere at 3...3.25 GB. Meaning if you have for instance 4GB you can not use 0.75...1GB of it.

I stumbled accoss one tool that can access this otherwise lost memory and turns it into a ramdrive. Some more info is here: http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php Haven't used it myself but perhaps this is helpful. It's surely faster than caching on disk and the memory could not be used otherwise.

just to note, the reason those addres ranges under 4GB aren't normally accessible to 32bit OS's is because the OS uses the same addressing space to cover devices (like your vid card).

dunno how that product works to access that space (hopefully not using PAE) but it'd be a nice bonus.

you are right.
what i did not mention was that this was supposed to be for a system without raid capabilities.

That's true of hardware, but not how the software uses it. You see that problem more on Windows, but less so on Linux in general.

Linux does what it can to speed of reads by keeping what it can in memory. Since the cache itself is only a gigabyte (imagine me saying this 10 years ago...), if you take your machine's normal memory usage and add a gigabyte, you will effectively get your cache in RAM anyway until you start opening a bunch of other stuff that pushes it out of the filesystem cache.

This is why some games, like Vice City, run like a dog when you cross the center bridges in Windows, but you won't even get a load screen crossing the bridge in Linux after the first time you cross.

This is wrong. Linux can handle more than 4GB of RAM in 32-bit environments: Windows is alone in having this problem.