Windows, ReadyBoost, and RAM

[BloodyIron]

Okay so I understand that ReadyBoost offers improvement on small quick reads when RAM is a limited factor. But if you can get more RAM, or already have a lot of RAM. Why can't you just tell Windows to use more of it in favor of a much slower ReadyBoost option?

One could simply setup a RAM drive to do ReadyBoost with, but this seems like a hack fix for this.

 

[Bahamut]

ReadyBoost is designed to work best on machines with < 2GB of physical RAM. On machines with 2GB or more, it's effectiveness and usefulness is simply not even a consideration anymore. While some folks with 2GB or more still continue to use it, realistically it's not going to offer much help at all (even in spite of the "placebo effect" where people will say "Oh, I have 8GB of physical RAM and I'm using a 4GB USB stick for ReadyBoost and I notice things are much smoother").

It just ain't happening. Even the creators of ReadyBoost at Microsoft would say "Ok, that's just bullshit..." when people make such claims.

If you have 2GB of RAM or more, don't waste a USB stick thinking it's going to make any noticeable difference at all in how your system performs. Use the stick for something else.

And RAMdisks are far more useful for other purposes than ReadyBoost caches - put all your temp files, your browser caches, etc, on a RAMdisk and get better performance. Hell, get portable versions of your apps and run them directly off that RAMdisk for the fastest performance possible - even SSDs can't touch that level of speed - an SSD might max out around 280MB/s for reads, while a RAMdisk on most modern machines with DDR2 and DDR3 RAM reads data at speeds in excess of 7GB/s - that's GIGABYTES per second - or wickedly fast on machines with DDR3 triple channel, in excess of 12GB/s or more.

< 2GB of RAM and ReadyBoost will help, to some degree, and with less than 1.5GB of physical RAM, the benefits get better as RAM amounts get lower.

 

[DeaconFrost]

One could simply setup a RAM drive to do ReadyBoost with, but this seems like a hack fix for this.

If you have enough RAM, you wouldn't even be enabling/using ReadyBoost. It seems like you aren't quite sure as to when ReadyBoost is used or not. The basic belief is that anything 1 GB or over, won't yield any results with a ReadyBoost enabled drive used.

I had an old laptop with 756 MB of memory, and I installed Windows 7 HP on it just to see if it would run well. I popped in a 2 GB USB flash drive and enabled ReadyBoost, and that did speed up some of the usages. Anything more than 1 GB, and I can't say you notice any improvements.

 

[rflcptr]

Configuring a RAM drive for ReadyBoost is probably going to hurt performance.

 

[ameoba]

If you have all that extra RAM, the OS should already be using it for disk caching. Don't worry about it.

 

[bigdogchris]

If you have enough RAM, you wouldn't even be enabling/using ReadyBoost. It seems like you aren't quite sure as to when ReadyBoost is used or not. The basic belief is that anything 1 GB or over, won't yield any results with a ReadyBoost enabled drive used.

I had an old laptop with 756 MB of memory, and I installed Windows 7 HP on it just to see if it would run well. I popped in a 2 GB USB flash drive and enabled ReadyBoost, and that did speed up some of the usages. Anything more than 1 GB, and I can't say you notice any improvements.

Yeah, I'm not exactly understanding what this guy is talking about. I think you're on the right track though.

 

[Jon55]

If you have more than 2 GB of RAM, Readyboost will show almost no performance difference. If you have less than 2 GB of RAM, you'll notice a some performance boosts here and there.

 

[Mubata]

ReadyBoost is designed to work best on machines with < 2GB of physical RAM. On machines with 2GB or more, it's effectiveness and usefulness is simply not even a consideration anymore. While some folks with 2GB or more still continue to use it, realistically it's not going to offer much help at all (even in spite of the "placebo effect" where people will say "Oh, I have 8GB of physical RAM and I'm using a 4GB USB stick for ReadyBoost and I notice things are much smoother").

It just ain't happening. Even the creators of ReadyBoost at Microsoft would say "Ok, that's just bullshit..." when people make such claims.

If you have 2GB of RAM or more, don't waste a USB stick thinking it's going to make any noticeable difference at all in how your system performs. Use the stick for something else.

And RAMdisks are far more useful for other purposes than ReadyBoost caches - put all your temp files, your browser caches, etc, on a RAMdisk and get better performance. Hell, get portable versions of your apps and run them directly off that RAMdisk for the fastest performance possible - even SSDs can't touch that level of speed - an SSD might max out around 280MB/s for reads, while a RAMdisk on most modern machines with DDR2 and DDR3 RAM reads data at speeds in excess of 7GB/s - that's GIGABYTES per second - or wickedly fast on machines with DDR3 triple channel, in excess of 12GB/s or more.

< 2GB of RAM and ReadyBoost will help, to some degree, and with less than 1.5GB of physical RAM, the benefits get better as RAM amounts get lower.

There are a few minor things that utilizing readyboost on large RAM configurations which speed up some operations. I live in an area with frequent lighting strikes. End result, my UPS often tells the computer to hibernate when line interruptions become severe. Since OS data is cached to readyboost stick, resuming is extremely fast since that data is already cached, and very little HDD access is needed during resume process.

Also, some there are some performance benefits when running several large apps, which may consume all available RAM, pushing that cached data out its cached location in RAM. Since that data is still available on the readyboost drive, during a time of already-frequent IO operations and heavy RAM usage, having cached system data on the readyboost drive does offer some performance benefits.

But, as suggested by Microsoft, your readyboost drive should be of equal or greater size to the amount of installed RAM to see the greatest benefit. And, unless you fully utilize your RAM, you'll only see diminishing returns from the use of a readyboost drive. So you are absolutely right in your example above, a 4GB thumbstick, for 8GB of RAM isn't going to offer much benefit.

Best solution has always been to install more RAM, but usage really determines if you'll see much benefit out of readyboost in large RAM situations. For most people, no... there is little, if any benefit. But for other people, or as in the case of frequently resuming from hibernate (and not sleep), it makes it worth the investment in a relatively inexpensive thumbdrive.

 

[westrock2000]

Why can't you just tell Windows to use more of it in favor of a much slower ReadyBoost option?

If you have 4GB+ of memory you would see the biggest performance by turning off the paging file period. Windows will then only use RAM. I would really recommend at least 6GB if you want to do this, 8GB would be better.

** There are many warnings against not having a paging file, and I can not conclusivly argue them. I can only offer that I did it for 1 year+ on 2 computers and none showed any problems as far as crashing or BSOD. Even with 2 World of Warcrafts running fulling saturating 6GB of RAM.

I would only recommend this on systems that have hard disk drives or older SSD's that don't have TRIM abilitiy. If you have a newer SSD with TRIM, you dont have to worry about pagefile at all.