Has anyone ever set EQ up on a ramdisk and is there any advantage in doing so? And any tricks involved past setting up a ram drive an copying the game to it? Happen to have 32 gigs for other reasons so thought of trying it.
Heh heh well hopefully someone will tell me about it hear. I created a 20 gig ram disk copied the game to it but am not seeing any significant zone or loading speed increases. I am guessing that server communication limits the overall speed or I am missing something. I was on a raid setup for access speed before but a ramdisk should still show an increase over that.
From the testing I've seen, the majority of the delay is network induced. Not throughput but just sitting around waiting for the servers to reply. Always hopeful to find something faster though. Thank you for your testing!
I read an article somewhere about this. It seems like the main advantage is that since your log file is written directly to the RAM instead of to the hard disk, you're extending the life of your hard disk. Or at least, if you set up a ram disk and junction link your .log files to it. The article didn't mention any other advantages.
You'll get no advantage from running EQ on a RAM disk. A RAM disk only shines when you are accessing hundreds / thousands of small files for some data crunching where the bottle neck is your HDD seek time. EQ loads up the textures, sounds, and then zone files. That takes like 5 seconds and then you don't do it again until you zone.
Experience seems to be bearing this out so far. I was hoping zoning would be much faster but I am not seeing any big increase from operating off a raid setup.
Hmmm.. well having switched back yes I can see the ram drive loads faster. I might keep using but have to think about that. I dont turn my system off much which is a plus... shutting down the pc takes much longer as the disk image gets copied to a hard drive.
Windows automatically does it's own disk caching, so if you a bit of memory free, and zone out and zone into an zone, you'll probably nearly match the speed of a RAM disk, and thus won't see much of any improvement. As others have said, most of the time is probably spent waiting on the server, which can be exacerbated by server lag (e.g. Ragefire).
You might consider looking into a SSD. I run from a 512G SSD with swapfile turned off, between both the OS and EQ on the SSD you will notice a speed difference.
Yeah I have an SSD for the OS. Running EQ off a raid drive access speed setup atm (always forget which raid that is). I might move EQ over to the SSD or wailt till I get another SSD. SSD has swap off atm. I did notice some sort of EQ crash file filling up the SSD though. Something I have to keep an eye on.
