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I have 8gigs of RAM in this machine. I never really use more than say 4gigs (includes my virtual machines I use for dev testing).

What can I do with this extra space to best improve system performance?

Some guesses:

  • Improve my disk performance by turning off the pagefile?
  • Improve my disk performance by increasing the disk cache amount?
  • Move temporary folders to a ramdisk?
  • Somehow configure SuperFetch to cache more? (currently 1.5gigs)
  • Any other suggestions??

This is on 64-bit Windows 7.

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Remember you could run another vm or give your current vm more memory. – Troggy♦ Aug 25 '09 at 22:21
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6 Answers

up vote 19 down vote

Don't disable your page file. See here.

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This is the kind of gold I post here for. – Nick Whaley Aug 25 '09 at 22:34
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I disagree. If you're sure that you always have more than enough RAM for everything you run (including program code, data and disk cache) then having a pagefile cannot possibly increase performance. It can only reduce performance, because Windows will preemptively write to the pagefile even though it won't be needed. I have 8GB RAM myself and like the OP, I rarely use more than 3-4GB of it. I see less disk activity with the pagefile disabled. – EMP Aug 26 '09 at 5:29
windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/… – Molly7244 Aug 26 '09 at 11:41
Interesting article, but the reason it gives is rather vague - "Windows tends not to function as reliably". I'd be interested in a bit more detail than that, so I've actually opened a separate question for it: superuser.com/questions/30345/… – EMP Aug 26 '09 at 23:35
@Evgeny: The performance gain of disabling the pagefile is minimal at best, and in most cases completely unnoticeable, unless you're doing some really extreme I/O-bound work. There is simply no reason to disable it. Sure, there is less disk activity, but have you actually noticed a performance gain? I didn't when I tried it. – musicfreak Jul 3 '10 at 6:49
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up vote 6 down vote

Try putting portable Firefox on a ramdisk and enjoy a dramatic speed increase. Dataram is free and saves its contents to hard disk when you shut down the computer (and optionally at regular intervals).

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I tried that and unfortunately I didn't notice much of a speed increase. It started up a bit faster, but that's about it. :( – musicfreak Jul 3 '10 at 5:46
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up vote 5 down vote

If you want, you can try loading some of your most-used programs in a RAM Disk to make them load faster. I tend to just leave it alone and let Superfetch do it's job. When I leave my computer on for a couple days it's not unusual to see it cache 6GB of programs and files.

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Oh, my :) ! 6 GB of programs? – alex Aug 26 '09 at 8:32
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up vote 3 down vote

move the browser cache to RAM disk.

disabling virtual memory is certainly an option, but may have a negative impact on certain programs that explicitly require paging, but then, it's only a few mouse clicks away to turn back on :)

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up vote 2 down vote

These days the "slowness" of a PC are most likely caused by your harddisk. You should try to use your ram to tackle this weakness.

Create a big ram disk partition (~3GB), set your frequently used programs to use that partition as temporary drive. You'll be amazed by how fast your programs will become.

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up vote 0 down vote

Let Windows manage the memory. It does a much better job than you can, even if you understand how it works, which you probably don't. A RAMDISK is almost always a poor use of memory. Disabling the pagefile will more often than not impair performance.

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