Is it a good idea to set private directory of DBISAM to a RAM drive created by
RAM disk for performance reasons?

Abdulaziz,

<< Is it a good idea to set private directory of DBISAM to a RAM drive
created by RAM disk for performance reasons? >>

As long as the RAM drive behaves itself and follows the Windows file system
mode of operation, then you shouldn't have any problems.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim,

<<As long as the RAM drive behaves itself and follows the Windows file system
mode of operation, then you shouldn't have any problems.>>

RAM disk behaves like a normal hard drive.  However, I was expecting big improve in the performance of my DB application.  But there wasn't any
difference.  I even moved the whole DB to that drive but also no difference.  I think Windows does a lot of caching which makes RAM drives useless.

Abdulaziz,

<< RAM disk behaves like a normal hard drive.  However, I was expecting big
improve in the performance of my DB application.  But there wasn't any
difference.  I even moved the whole DB to that drive but also no difference.
I think Windows does a lot of caching which makes RAM drives useless. >>

Yes, more than likely the RAM drive was simply being swapped out to disk as
part of the virtual memory paging, thus negating any performance
improvements.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim,

<<Yes, more than likely the RAM drive was simply being swapped out to disk as
part of the virtual memory paging, thus negating any performance
improvements.>>


Even when using the RAM disk I still can see some hard drive activities (The light of the hard drive keep flashing) which mean that the RAM disk is
really not using the physical RAM but instead using the virtual memory, and part of it could be on the physical hard drive.  So YES you are 100%
right.  However are there any tools out there that uses the physical RAM?

Abdulaziz,

<< Even when using the RAM disk I still can see some hard drive activities
(The light of the hard drive keep flashing) which mean that the RAM disk is
really not using the physical RAM but instead using the virtual memory, and
part of it could be on the physical hard drive.  So YES you are 100% right.
However are there any tools out there that uses the physical RAM? >>

Not without using special hardware, no.  Plus, it would most likely have to
be accessed through the system bus, which I believe would slow things down a
bit from "normal" memory.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Abdulaziz Jasser wrote:

>
> Even when using the RAM disk I still can see some hard drive
> activities (The light of the hard drive keep flashing) which mean
> that the RAM disk is really not using the physical RAM but instead
> using the virtual memory, and part of it could be on the physical
> hard drive.  So YES you are 100% right.  However are there any tools
> out there that uses the physical RAM?

You can always disable the page file if you have enough memory. That's
how I run my system here at work(4gb) and at home (1gb).


-- AJ Marknette

Tim,
AJ Marknette,


Ive sent an email (the bellow email) to RAMDisk technical support and this what I got from them:


Hello Abdulaziz,
Thank you for taking the time to evaluate our RamDisk.

Our RamDisk and RamDisk Plus software always uses physical memory only! RamDisk does not use virtual memory technology therefore it does not
get paged to the hard drive as in a swapfile. RamDisk "presents" itself to the OS as physical hard drive not a virtual drive.

Hope that helps a little.

Best Regards,
Michael Horniak
SuperSpeed LLC

>>  Hi,
>>  

>>  I have downloaded RAM disk for XP and thought I will get more speed if I
>>  moved my Database to that drive. But sadly there wasn't any performance
>>  increase!!! I think that is due RAM Disk uses virtual memory which some
>>  times do paging to the physical hard drive (BACK TO ZERO). The question:
>>  Is there a way to force RAM Disk to use ONLY the physical RAM?
>>  
>>  Regards,
>>  Abdulaziz Jasser