Virtual ramdisk with readyboost, perfmon

Torrentula81 · 17 Jun 2012

I'm testing out using a virtual ramdisk as a readyboost removable media. I reload the saved image at logon so data is persistent. In perfmon I can tell where its read from the readyboost cache vs disk. So far it looks promising. Is there a counter in perfmon that displays the process names with cpu usage? Because i go into my log and there's no way of telling what i was doing at that time. If i know this then i can learn what actions readyboost helps with. That's as far I have gone into observing if readyboost can help improve my system. I am hoping some other people have tried testing this out and can share what they did.

Wrend · 19 Jun 2012

This has been tested by others before, mostly with Vista though. The general conclusions have been that it doesn't offer any significant amount of system performance improvement.

My understanding is that ReadyBoost is somewhat similar to a paging system, only instead of using slower traditional HDDs, it's designed for somewhat faster removable media storage devices, and/or perhaps as a kind of alternative to SuperFetch. (ReadyBoost - Windows 7 features - Microsoft Windows "ReadyBoost is designed to help when your PC's memory is running low. Low memory can make your computer sluggish because Windows, which needs a place to stash data, turns to the hard drive. Flash memory offers a speedier alternative.") The main advantage comes only from using ReadyBoost with systems that don't have sufficient RAM. If you have more than enough RAM, considering you have enough extra to make a RAM drive, then you likely won't get much if any system performance improvement by using ReadyBoost, even though you are using it on the much faster RAM drive.

You might try using the RAM drive for temp files, browser cache, paging space on 32 bit systems that can't otherwise use the extra RAM, and for temporarily storing files and running programs that are frequently read from and written to (such as games that often load new areas, or video/audio/photo editing programs and files.)

Also, keep in mind that Windows 7 does a better job of proactively using available RAM with features such as SuperFetch.

Torrentula81 · 23 Jun 2012

I agree with you on this. After some more testing it did grab from the ramdrive but its far from usable for the average person. Windows decides it has to load the whole thing after every single reboot = broken and useless ms invention. Doesn't superfetch do this? Yes it does like you mentioned. Also once the files are read one time they are sped up already for the request so no point if you have the enough ram. Thanks for the input.

kado897 · 23 Jun 2012

It is conventional wisdom that if you have more than 2GB of RAM then readyboost will not help. My experience is somewhat different I have 8GB RAM and I see a noticeable improvement with an 8GB high performance SDHC card dedicated to readyboost.