Anyone ever use a RAM DRIVE to play FS2004?

[swambast 0]

I was just curious if anyone ever experimented with using a RAM DRIVE to play FS2004. If so, what kind of results did you get?

[Noel 4,551]

Yes, I have. I used it to create a swap file on, so that no swapping to disk occured, but instead to the the ram drive. I noticed absolutely no change in FS performance doing this. But I also have a high end drive system so your mileage may vary. I used an ingenious program called RamDriveNT (if I recall) and it will allow you to boot up, with your RamDrive set up, and designate it for your VM swap file. As you may have noticed, there is continuous swapping going on (if you watch mem use in TaskManageer), so I though this might make a difference. My drive system is pretty fast though, with seek times of <4ms, 80mb/sec transfer rates, and pretty low CPU utilization.Noel

[someone 0]

Putting your swap file in RAM drive kind of defeats the purpose of a swap file. First of all creating a RAM disk decreases the ammount of available memory for programs to use, so that there will make your performace worse. The swap file is where things are placed in when you run low on memory. By putting your swap file on a RAM disk, your forcing less memory and more swapping.To answer the original poster's question, using a RAM drive will not make FS run any faster FPS wise. It will load faster, but then again you'll still have to copy FS into the RAM drive first.

[Guest product]

I think you would lose the occassional "hesitation" stutter you get when the HD is accessed, even on a fast machine?Joel

[swambast 0]

Thanks to all for your responses, I appreciate your imput.Joel, that is what REALLY prompted my question. If all of FS2004 is loaded into memory, I would think that when FS goes to load specific texture/graphic files, it would be loading at RAM speed vs. hard disk drive speed. To me, that would have to result in faster performance, no?

[Noel 4,551]

>Putting your swap file in RAM drive kind of defeats the>purpose of a swap file.I disagree with your analysis as it applies to this situation, Jim. What I found was that for some odd reason, FS will utilize virtual memory about equally as it does available physical ram, despite the amount of available ram. When I load a flight in FS, and start Task Manager, I can see maybe 300mb being used, on a 1gb ram system. As the sim session moves along in duration, I find about the same amount of ram being used is steadily increasing, but so is swapping to VM, and at about the same rate. My thinking was, by putting VM into RAM, I could fool FS into not using the HDD for swapping. Indeed, when you are flying along you can see free ram and VM useage going up continuously.Can you explain why FS uses VM equally with free ram, versus favoring the use of free ram until that approaches too close to max, then routing over to VM?Noel

[swambast 0]

Hmm, maybe the RamDrive idea might be worth trying - we could load the pagefile into the RamDrive, and test it...Regards, SteveSystem Specs:O/C homegrown MSI 865PE Neo 2, O/C P4 2.9Ghz/800Mhz FSB, 1GB PC3200 400Mhz Ram, 36GB 10,000 RPM WD Raptor/120GB Maxtor ATA133, O/C GeForce4 Ti4600 w/45.23a Omega drivers, DirectX 9.0b, WinXP Pro, SoundBlaster Audigy 2 with 6.1 speakers, CH Products Flight Sim Yoke USB

[Noel 4,551]

Steve, what are you using for your ramdrive software? I know it was tricky with RamDriveNT--you have to set it up correctly else you can sometimes become unbootable. But I did set it up correctly, and sure enough FS would page to the ramdrive. I used a memory activity monitor utility, and you could see write operations to the ramdrive and none to the other physical HDDs.

[Guest product]

There's actually a high-end computer system that's designed to operate like this out of the box- something called "L systems" based in california. Has a huge RAM capacity and programs run straight off it, no accessing any HD. They have a website somehwere...Best,Joel

[Guest JeanLuc_]

Since you have 1GB RAM, which is enough for Windows XP under normal conditions, why not trying the following: disable your VM pagefile, or, set it to a fixed size of the minimum amount it allows (1KB?), and compare! under FS2004, unless you are running a memory leaking add-on (some are doing this), 1GB should proove to be suffucient. By the way, to ensure you won't have any problem, you can add a column in the task manager to display the peak mem useage!Let us know about your findings!

[Noel 4,551]

The problem is, you will be able to avoid swapping, but you won't be avoiding read operations as FS has to continually update textures and audio as you move along. Only way around that is to install FS itself into a ramdrive, and you would need serious space to do that.

[Guest christianholmes]

FS uses the page file for caching. The only way to really make it not do that, is to disable the page file, and then run FS off a RAM drive. The nice part is you wouldn't need to boot off the RAM drive- just create it, and install FS there. There would be a noteable performance increase for load times, but it wouldn't help your framerates significantly. The problem is, you need at least a gig to run XP without a page file, and I wouldn't run much else besides FS, and then you would need several gigs of RAM for your FS install. My installation is 6 gigs, and most non-server mobos won't take that much RAM. Would be sweet though.I think the less expensive, and better solution is to put some really fast drives in your system. 10k SCSI drives in a RAID 1 or 5, or even SATA drives in a RAID 1 will make a noticeable difference. The SATA solution will only cost a few hundred bucks, and it will increase performance for all your programs, not just FS. My load times are 1/2 what they were since I put in a SATA array, and the stuttering is less.