Making The Best Use Of RAM In Windows

[bhobba]

TL;DR Summary

These days, RAM is relatively cheap. PCs often have much more than is needed for browsing, etc., for which casual users mostly use their machines. Generally, about 8 GB is all that is needed for that, yet 16 GB is often standard. Some laptops even have 32 GB, 64 GB, and I have even seen a whopping 128 GB. A caching program is one way to use the extra RAM.

These days, the cost of a fast Gen 4 SSD is cheap: about $38 for a Gen 4 NVME drive. This is why many new laptops have at least that, and many have 1 TB or more. Again, casual users do not require even 256 GB

With modern overpowered systems (depending on how you use them) or if you want a better-performing system, I would get the caching program PrimoCache. Assume 16 GB RAM and 256 GB Gen 4 SSD. Partition the SSD into 2 128 GB drives. Put Windows and programs on partition 1. As I will explain, partition two will be used as a cache for a slower drive.

With 16 GB RAM, 8 GB is used for cache, and 8 GB for programs. 4 GB is allocated as a read-only cache for the operating system and programs on partition 1. Do not use cache writes on this drive; if power fails, it could corrupt your system, although with a laptop, you may be inclined to risk it. This will significantly increase the operating system's speed. It is even possible to have that 4GB saved to your SSD when powered down and loaded back when powered up, reducing boot times. Benchmarks show that a 24-second boot time is reduced to 12 seconds.

The second 4 GB is allocated as a read-and-write cache for partition 2, which is assigned as a cache for your slower drive. This will make reading and writing to that drive for files under 4GB very fast. Up to 128GB is still fast, much quicker than the drive on which the SSD is cached.
People sometimes ask, ‘How can I load Windows directly into RAM?’. It would not require much RAM with de-bloated versions of Windows that can occupy as little as 3–8 GB on a disk. While Windows can’t be loaded into memory, read-caching accomplishes something similar. With how fast Gen 4 SSDs are (and Gen 5 will be even quicker - but at the moment the extra speed is not worth the cost, as several comparisons have shown) for writes, I doubt, in practice, there would be much difference if you could load Windows into memory.

As an aside, with a lot of me, you can load several Linux distributions into RAM and boot. Just boot from a USB stick and it loads into memory.

Of course, if you want even better performance, you can use a larger SSD and more memory. People sometimes ask what you do with 64GB or even 128GB of memory. Cache is the answer. I bought a new laptop with a 1 TB SSD and 64 GB of RAM for under $1500.

Thanks
Bill

 

[sbrothy]

I once installed Microsoft's Outlook Server and was surprised by the fact that it simply allocated all the RAM (and possibly took over all other resources programs would have to ask the operating system for). Any program subsequently asking the OS for RAM would thus indirectly ask MS Outlook Server. Initially I thought this an error but no, it was it's normal behavior. At the time I thought it pretty arrogant to just appropriate the entire system like that. Obviously Outlook was intended to be alone on the server!

The server was renamed "PIGGY", although we had a Greek god's name thing going on generally. (The database server was called "CHAOS". Talk about kicking destiny in the family jewels!)