To RAM a disk, or not?

"David" wrote in message

I have just cobbled together a new system, Athlon 5000 64 X2, 2 GB RAM, loads of disk space. Now I’m wondering if it
would make any sense to buy a bit more RAM and use it as a RAMdisk? Any opinions????

I would just let the system use it as disk cache. Photoshop CS2 (and beta CS3) will use 3 gb of memory, if your system supports it, and if you add the /3GB switch to your boot.ini. This works on my XP pro system, and rumor has it it also works for XP home.
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/

Mike,

What is the 3 GB switch in boot.ini?

I upped my XP Pro system to 3 GB and did nothing to boot.ini. Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Dennis

"Mike Russell" wrote in message

"David" wrote in message

I have just cobbled together a new system, Athlon 5000 64 X2, 2 GB RAM, loads of disk space. Now I’m wondering if it
would make any sense to buy a bit more RAM and use it as a RAMdisk? Any opinions????

I would just let the system use it as disk cache. Photoshop CS2 (and beta CS3) will use 3 gb of memory, if your system supports it, and if you add the /3GB switch to your boot.ini. This works on my XP pro system, and rumor has it it also works for XP home.
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/

"Dennis Hughes" wrote in message

Mike,

What is the 3 GB switch in boot.ini?

You add an extra line to boot.ini that looks something like this (watch out for line breaks):
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB" /fastdetect /3GB /USERVA=2944 /NoExecute=OptIn

This gives you the option, at boot time, to allow designated applications to use 3 GB of memory.

I upped my XP Pro system to 3 GB and did nothing to boot.ini. Am I missing something?

Windows will use the extra memory for its own operations, including disk cacheing, so you’ll see some benefit even without the 3GB switch. Only certain programs take advantage of the 3GB switch. Photoshop CS2 is one of them. If you are not getting out of memory errors, then your images are probably not large enough to benefit from the additional memory space. My experience is that at about 60 megapixels you begin to run into memory errors with certain operations in Photoshop. OTOH, try it and see – you may get increased performance. Not all hardware platforms work with the 3GB switch . It is possible to end up with a system that will not boot at all, so be sure to retain the original entry in boot.ini so that you can get back where you started.

BTW – this switch controls the address space (virtual memory) potentially allocated to an application, not the physical memory. As such it does not directly depend on the actual amount of memory installed on your system. For example, my 1.2 GB system can handle very large images, although it does so slowly because of all the swapping.
—
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/

Thanks for sharing this important info. I will definitely add the switch.

I checked and it is not in the boot.ini file. And I routinely process 50-100 MB files in CS2.

Every bit of performance helps, especially if it is free.

Dennis

"Mike Russell" wrote in message

"Dennis Hughes" wrote in message

Mike,

What is the 3 GB switch in boot.ini?

You add an extra line to boot.ini that looks something like this (watch out for line breaks):
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 3GB" /fastdetect /3GB /USERVA=2944 /NoExecute=OptIn
This gives you the option, at boot time, to allow designated applications to use 3 GB of memory.

I upped my XP Pro system to 3 GB and did nothing to boot.ini. Am I missing something?

Windows will use the extra memory for its own operations, including disk cacheing, so you’ll see some benefit even without the 3GB switch. Only certain programs take advantage of the 3GB switch. Photoshop CS2 is one of them. If you are not getting out of memory errors, then your images are probably not large enough to benefit from the additional memory space. My experience is that at about 60 megapixels you begin to run into memory errors with certain operations in Photoshop. OTOH, try it and see – you may get increased performance. Not all hardware platforms work with the 3GB switch . It is possible to end up with a system that will not boot at all, so be sure to retain the original entry in boot.ini so that you can get back where you started.

BTW – this switch controls the address space (virtual memory) potentially allocated to an application, not the physical memory. As such it does not directly depend on the actual amount of memory installed on your system. For example, my 1.2 GB system can handle very large images, although it does so slowly because of all the swapping.
—
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/

"Dennis Hughes" wrote in message

Thanks for sharing this important info. I will definitely add the switch.
I checked and it is not in the boot.ini file. And I routinely process 50-100 MB files in CS2.

I found that around 50 or 60 megapixels images ran into problems – which would be 150 to 180 megabytes.

Every bit of performance helps, especially if it is free.

Absolutely – give it a try and let us know if things are faster. —

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com/forum/