Yes, you allocate a portion of your ram to be used as a virtual drive where you will install your program(s).
How do you determine how much ram should be allocated to a program? I'm thinking of trying it w/Firefox, see if it speeds it up any. H
Ah, I read thru the site. I see it gives recommendations for allocation according to how much ram you have installed. H
The operating system allocates memory to a program when that program requests it. If there is not enough physical memory to go round, then memory pages are swapped to/from a swap or page file according to OS virtual memory management algorithms. These usually do a good job. Human intervention is unlikely to improve things. Using a RAM disk is only likely to help performance for programs that than have significant amounts of file access. Browsers are not in that category. Also remember if you allocate memory to a RAM file, you have less physical memory to go round and are more likely to have paging to/from the swap file or partition. Heavy swapping is the biggest killer of system performance there is.
Have a look at the size of your Firefox folder as a starting point and add some more (to cover future expansion of that folder). I have 3gigs on my computer for example and have allocated 1 gig to Ramdisk which is more than enough to accommodate MS and allow some room to install any other items on it if need be.
dcraig is right ... if you monitor file access its only in loading that firefox does a lot of disk work. I use a free ramdisk to run Sierra Chart ... I basically set up a 70M space in my 2000M of ram and copy the 25M Sierra chart directory into it before I start trading. Then I have a batch file that copies it back every hour so that I don't lose data by accidentally forgetting to copy it back before shutting off. I did this primarily to stop wearing out my hard drive with all the file updates but it also makes the program lightning fast.
Would there be any program that is used in internet access that would benefit from Ramdisk? (I'm running XP Pro.) We don't have Verizon in my area and the fastest we can get here is about 6Mbps. I know it wouldn't speed up the connection, but anything that would make any component of the whole internet access faster. Thanks, Harold
In general, the answer is no. What you see is what you get. A simple rule of thumb is to observe the disk activity LED when running a program. If it is showing a fair bit of disk activity, then a ramdisk *might* help. Otherwise it is likely to do more harm than good by consuming some of the system memory which might be put to better use for other things.
hcour I've found that Avast slows down my internet connection as one of it's 'shields' scans web pages, so maybe have a look at your virus scanner to see if it has such a feature (and disable it as I often do with avast). Some people also put their temporary internet file folder in ramdisk, but I'm not sure if they get any improvement from it. Good luck