Virtual Memory

[mgrove91]

Hello all,

I'm looking at using a larger flash drive for the ReadyBoost function and wondering what your thoughts are on it. At the moment I have about 4GB of a flash drive ready-boosted and I have noticed a slight increase in performance. Does it really only affect the paging file and such? I'm not very familiar with virtual memory. Could anyone shed some light on this for me?

Thanks all.

W7 32bit OS
2x2GB Patriot Memory
ATI Radeon HD 4890
AMD Athlon 64 X2

 

[whs]

With 4GB of RAM (if I read your specs correctly), Ready Boost has zero effect - it may be even negative because of the additional overhead. If you think you saw a performance improvement you bettter check again.
In fact your page file may never be used anyhow. You can check that in Resource Monitor > Memory tab. Look on the top (Hard Faults). If that row is zero, you have no page faults at all.

 

[mgrove91]

Thanks for the quick reply

One or two of the programs has a less-than-ten digit for it but most are zeroes. When exactly would readyboost have an effect then?

 

[whs]

ReadyBoost was a bandaid for the early Vista systems that came from XP with only 512MB ot 1GB of RAM. Thoses systems were suffering from a lot of page thrashing (high paging activity). In those cases a USB stick that had a very good access time (less than 1ms) could help speed up the paging. Problem is that most USB sticks are too slow to make any difference anyhow.
Compare the access time of the 2 sticks below - both Kingston Traveler. You can probably imagine that the first one would be completely counterproductive. A HDD is 4 times faster.