How to move the Win98 swapfile to a ramdrive

[Six Of One]

Well, i would like to move the Windows swapfile to a ramdrive but all attempts fail, because Windows doesn't let me choose a ramdrive as location in the memory management.

How do i convince Windows to allow me to select the ramdrive as location for the swapfile? Any ideas? Is it a sensible idea at all? Should i disable Virtual Memory all together?

Currently using:
Windows98SE
XMSDSK V1.9
384MB RAM, 150MB for Ramdrive mapped to Z:

Regards

[rugger]

Huh.

Any particular reason you want to place the swapfile onto the ramdrive. The swapfile is used to store what is in memory when the system runs out and needs more.

By using a ramdrive, you are reducing the amount of memory avaliable for applications, hence making the computer use swap sooner. The overhead of swap (even to ramdisk) leaves you behind here.

Also, There isn't much of a point even using the ramdrive as a temporary file area. Spare ram is used by the operating system to cache both the reading and writing of the harddrive, almost emulating a ramdrive.

If you play games or do big things with your computer, I recommend you set your swapspace to at least 600meg (both min and max sizes). If you don't do either of these, you can probably just disable the swap space. Don't use a ramdisk at all whichever path you go.

You can optimize the swapspace performace by:

1) disabling the swapspace
2) defraging the drive that holds the swapspace
3) reenabling the swapspace.

To answer you question though: The ramdisk drivers probably don't provide a low level interface (to directly access sectors), so windows cannot use it as swap space like real hard drive.

[cjolley]

It makes no sense to put your swapfile on a ramdrive.
This setup would just add overhead.
The point of a swap file is to allow your computer to appear to have more memory than it does to running programs. The swap file isn't even used unless you run out of physical ram (to over generalize)
Turning some of your physical ram into swap space just forces the OS to start using the swap file process earlier than it would have.
A 150MB swap file would be too small anyway.
chuck

[Six Of One]

I came up with this plan, because i read that Windows will use the swapfile wether it is out of RAM or not. Most sites offering RAM boosters or the like claim this to be the case.

Currently i have virtual memory disabled with no ill effects so far. I think i will stay with this setting until a problem occurs.

On another thing: i have also read that a swapfile of fixed 128MB is optimal.

Thank you anyhow.
Regards

[Kosh Naranek]

You can tweak Win9x not to use the swapfile unless it really needs to, by putting the following in your System.Ini file under [386ENH] section...

ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1


Furthermore you can use a program like CacheMan to reduce the amount of memory used by the Win9x Disk Cache thus giving more memory to apps. etc.

[Bohrn]

Ya beat me to it Kosh

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