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Ram Bandwidth, Timings, Bottlenecks & Ram Disk.
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Velarra
#1 - 2015-04-06 16:01:15 UTC
Modern Ram is available in various bandwidths from 1333, 1600 through to much larger values. Equally its timing traits tend to vary, advertised from CL ## to CL#. Advertising seems to suggest greater bandwidth and tighter timings as being points of judgement and great excited fuss if you take the advertising seriously. Meanwhile if one bothers to look into it a little, much common sense, for the average user comes down to - the marketing fuss and technical characteristics around various brands and advertised speeds is just that - marketing noise. Sure, in some very specific professional environments these traits may matter. But really, they don't.

Great! So a real world average user/gamer is probably best off with a decent brand of ram with average speed traits. Anything more is just fashion, vanity and bragging rights.

But what if you're using a Ramdisk (in this case: ImDisk)? A Ramdisk where you knowingly accept the occasional inconveniences it creates - re: occasionally loading it up with content from a mass storage drive, and now and then changing its file system block size relative to the kind of intended use you want to apply it to (lots of large or small file sizes stored).

Do improved ram timings and the various bandwidths ram is available in (when coupled with suitable file system block sizes for the files being moved around), dramatically improve read / write times within the Ram Disk?

Or does a CPU and its surrounding architecture actually end up becoming a read/write bottleneck before the ram's specifications ever meaningfully come into play?
Black Panpher
CastleKickers
Rote Kapelle
#2 - 2015-04-07 11:00:54 UTC
This again? It's already proved that modern high speed ram I.e. Cas10-11 2400mhz will net you about 5fps extra in gaming over the equivalent 1800.
And as a gaming enthusiast this IS a big deal and paying the extra 50bucks or whatever is a small price to pay for such gains.
Eve Solecist
Shitt Outta Luck - GANKING4GOOD
#3 - 2015-04-07 13:36:45 UTC  |  Edited by: Eve Solecist
Look at relative gain.

You will not see any noticeable difference
between any of these brands.

Comparing it to gaming is nonsense,
because games have constant, heavy throughput.

You will not achieve that with a RAMDISK. Even assuming you
abuse it and cause heavy traffic on it for a longer time-frame,
the milliseconds you gain do not have any practical value whatsoever
and are not worth throwing extra money at it.

I would rather suggest picking a ramdisk
which is hand optimized in assembler.

The gain over a non optimized one is equally rediculously irrelevant,
but it costs you nothing to get a few more cycles out of your cpu.
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Velarra
#4 - 2015-04-07 16:05:27 UTC
Black Panpher wrote:
This again? It's already proved that modern high speed ram I.e. Cas10-11 2400mhz will net you about 5fps extra in gaming over the equivalent 1800.
And as a gaming enthusiast this IS a big deal and paying the extra 50bucks or whatever is a small price to pay for such gains.


Of note, this post isn't about FPS.

But faster read and write times from the ram ~disk~.
Velarra
#5 - 2015-04-07 16:30:57 UTC  |  Edited by: Velarra
Eve Solecist wrote:

Comparing it to gaming is nonsense,
because games have constant, heavy throughput.

You will not achieve that with a RAMDISK. Even assuming you
abuse it and cause heavy traffic on it for a longer time-frame,
the milliseconds you gain do not have any practical value whatsoever
and are not worth throwing extra money at it.

I would rather suggest picking a ramdisk
which is hand optimized in assembler.

The gain over a non optimized one is equally rediculously irrelevant,
but it costs you nothing to get a few more cycles out of your cpu.


This seems to make sense. However you do mention that games, have constant, heavy throughput. How do you mean "constant" ? My interest in its use with gaming tends to revolve around loading things such as resource cache files, data files, and their related directories. For instance Eve's Resource cache in Ram Disk pretty much eliminates any load times when moving from one system to a next or when loading busy grids. Everything appears almost instantly.

I equally see similar gains within the theme park Guild Wars 2, which has a 21gig .dat file and an exe flag which allows for reading and writing to that .dat file on any mounted disk. Actual file load times for regions are available and live while they load via another switch to confirm that the improved .dat from ramdisk load times aren't imaginary or being limited/improved by server performance (vs. any thing done on a client).

This of course is with average ram. Which led to the question, would better ram further improve these related read/write times. If i understand you correctly, you believe ram with improved bandwidth or timings would not improve read/write times within the ramdisk to any noticeable degree?
Eve Solecist
Shitt Outta Luck - GANKING4GOOD
#6 - 2015-04-07 16:43:48 UTC  |  Edited by: Eve Solecist
RAM is used to store data which does not fit into the caches of the cpu.
When you have lots of data to crunch constantly,
you will have lots of access to RAM,
even in a carefully, handoptimized assembler program.

Data has to come from somewhere.

RAMDISKs usually aren't used this way. It would be a waste of ressources and expose
a poor programmer, if he used a one to hide lag from disk reads.

If you have enough RAM you are right to use it for a RAMDISK,
but unless you constantly shove around gigabytes of data,
for a whole day or maybe more,
you will not see any measureable advantage.

It's far more likely that you will shave off a few NANOseconds by using a RAMDISK
which has proper cpu cache management and doesn't suffer from many pagefaults and cache misses.

Simpler...

RAM access timss are so low, that no matter what,
you won't notice even a second of saving by buying slightly faster RAM,
even if you used it 24h a day straight.

Save your money and pick a properly optimised RAMDISK instead ...
... or spend 50 bucks for a time-saving you would never EVER be able to notice anyway.

Don't compare RAM to RAM.
Compare HDD to RAM.
Even the cheapest, slowest RAM brings a massive speedboost.

And that's what matters to you.
Everything else is pointless bean counting,
like these 5fps increase which matter not except for small peens
and professional fps players.
  • All incoming connection attempts are being blocked. If you want to speak to me you will find me either in Hek local, you can create a contract or make a thread about it in General Discussions. I will call you back. -
Velarra
#7 - 2015-04-07 16:51:22 UTC
Eve Solecist wrote:
RAM is used to store data which does not fit into the caches of the cpu.
When you have lots of data to crunch constantly,
you will have lots of access to RAM,
even in a carefully, handoptimized assembler program.

Data has to come from somewhere.

RAMDISKs usually aren't used this way. It would be a waste of ressources and expose
a poor programmer, if he used a one to hide lag from disk reads.

If you have enough RAM you are right to use it for a RAMDISK,
but unless you constantly shove around gigabytes of data,
for a whole day or maybe more,
you will not see any measureable advantage.

It's far more likely that you will shave off a few NANOseconds by using a RAMDISK
which has proper cpu cache management and doesn't suffer from many pagefaults and cache misses.

Simpler...

RAM access timss are so low, that no matter what,
you won't notice even a second of saving by buying slightly faster RAM,
even if you used it 24h a day straight.

Save your money and pick a properly optimised RAMDISK instead ...
... or spend 50 bucks for a time-saving you would never EVER be able to notice anyway.

Don't compare RAM to RAM.
Compare HDD to RAM.
Even the cheapest, slowest RAM brings a massive speedboost.

And that's what matters to you.
Everything else is pointless bean counting,
like these 5fps increase which matter not except for small peens
and professional fps players.


Thank you. This about covers what i was looking for :)
Black Panpher
CastleKickers
Rote Kapelle
#8 - 2015-04-07 18:57:08 UTC
Velarra wrote:
Black Panpher wrote:
This again? It's already proved that modern high speed ram I.e. Cas10-11 2400mhz will net you about 5fps extra in gaming over the equivalent 1800.
And as a gaming enthusiast this IS a big deal and paying the extra 50bucks or whatever is a small price to pay for such gains.


Of note, this post isn't about FPS.

But faster read and write times from the ram ~disk~.


Apologies I focussed to heavy on-

"Great! So a real world average user/gamer is probably best off with a decent brand of ram with average speed traits. Anything more is just fashion, vanity and bragging rights."