"Aharon Demsky" wrote in message

I installed Cenatek's Ramdisk software which I've set up to convert 500Mb of my 1500Mb RAM to a Ramdisk. Great for Browser Cache and other temporary XP Pro stuff.

old, but excellent article about "usefulness" of ramdisks:

"
Will using a RAMDISK improve my system's performance?
One question that comes up continually is "Why can't I set up a RAMDISK and use that for the swapfile?"

The answer is found in the definition of the swapfile and why it exists. The swapfile exists because the computer does not have enough RAM to handle all of the code and data that needs to be loaded into memory. Therefore the swap file is created allowing disk space to be used as virtual memory so it can "pretend" to be RAM memory. The Window memory manager tracks which items are be used and which are inactive at present and moves the inactive ones to the virtual memory.

If a RAM disk is created then the RAM used for this will be taken away from windows. Windows will therefore have that much less RAM and will therefore need a correspondingly larger swap file to compensate. Let's look at some numbers. Suppose that the computer has 64 mb of RAM and a 16 mb swap file. This gives a total memory requirement of 80 mb. The user decides to create an18 mb RAM disk (allowing 10% extra for special situations) and assign the swap file to this. This reduces the RAM available to Windows to 48 mb. The total memory requirement remains at 80 mb, only now a 32 mb swapfile is needed because there is only 48 mb of physical RAM. But the swapfile is limited to only 18 mb because it is in a RAMDISK. Clang!!!!!!!!!

Another candidate for RAMDISKs are the temporary files - the ones that are normally created in c:\windows\temp and which are deleted (or are supposed to be deleted) when the applicaiton is closed. As these files are often small but are accessed very frequently it is often thought that putting these into a RAMDISK will improve performance. There is even a commercial product (Hurricane) that does this as a default when the program is installed. The problems arise when there is a need for more temporary files than the RAMDISK can hold. "Insufficient disk space" is the usual error message in these instances and it is sometimes difficult to trace because many people are not even aware of what Hurricane has done to their system. This type of error usually shows up when installing, or trying to install, some major new piece of software that creates a lot of temporary files during the install process. The RAMDISK gets full and the process crashes. Not a pretty sight."

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ahardemsk

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