Defrag your RAM?

[LaZorMan]

RAM can be defragged, just like a hard drive. I touched on this in an article at http://content.techweb.com/winmag/columns/explorer/2000/12.htm

But will it do any good? First, let's look at defragging a hard drive: Let’s say you want to load an application, and that defragging your hard drive lets you avoid 100 unnecessary repositionings of your drive’s mechanical “heads,” saving 10ms each time. That saves you 1000ms -- a full second -- which is an easily perceptible amount of time. Over the course of a day, a defragged PC indeed will feel noticeably faster than one that’s not defragged.

Now let’s look at loading an app from defragged RAM, bearing in mind the speed difference between RAM and hard drives: If defragmented RAM lets you avoid, say, 100 memory-access operations at 60ns each, you’ve saved 6000ns, or -- gosh! -- a whole six millionths of a second. To say that's too small to notice is beyond understatement. It's so small, it's irrelevant.

As far as I can see, any possible speed gain provided by RAM defraggers is more than offset by the time they take to run: You actually end up *losing* time!

The same article also deals with related issues such as making "holes" in RAM where large apps can reside, and more. See http://content.techweb.com/winmag/columns/explorer/2000/12.htm

LaZorMan

 

[scarecrow]

To my poor knowledge the best (and only working) way to have your RAM defragged is not running buggy software.

 

[LTR12101B]

There WAS a technique applicable in the old Win3.1 days - deliberately fragmenting lower memory, as every application needed a SMALL space there (for process headers or something, I forget), and windows had a habit of filling too much of it with ordinary code.

AFAIK, Win9x and above are less dependent on that area, though it MAY still be an issue if you run a lot of old 16 bit applications.


While I disgree entirely with any "monitoring" memory defragmenter/freeing tool, it does sometimes seem effective to use and immediate free-up before running a demanding program - though a reboot is probably more useful!

I had a couple of games which definitely ran better (on a 64Mb machine) if a "free 32Mb memory" was applied before running.

Attempting to automatically "free" memory (by ALLOCATING MORE) when memory is tight, runs completely contrary to good memory management, and is likely to swap out things that didn't need to be swapped out.

 

[Armagan1]

To my poor knowledge the best (and only working) way to have your RAM defragged is not running buggy software.

fully agree...

 

[dx]

One of the biggest problems I see with memory defraggers, is that the peeps who use them are convinced that it will suddenly give them more memory. Some of these companies claim that it will "double" or "turbocharge" your memory. In reality these defraggers really don't. Yes they can help optimize what you have, but the best way to get more system memory is PURCHASE IT! RAM is still one of the most cost effective upgrades for any computer system.

 

[LTR12101B]

I tried out "Magnaram" in Win3.1 - a "memory compressor".

In LIMITED cases, it may have been of use...

1. If you could convert from DISK swapping, to just compressed RAM swapping - but the compressed RAM pool is DEDUCTED from available RAM, so you're robbing peter to pay paul.

2. If the HD is slow and/or small compared to the CPU speed, where the compressed swapping will reduce the amount of data transferred to disk (the same case where using HD compression - DRIVESPACE might even improve performance, or at least not hurt it)


As for memory defragmenting, ACCESS is not the issue (apart from losing "page hit"), but alllocation is, and Windows should be able to relocate movable code as required, in order to release a large memory block if needed.

 

[ABCMan]

since my ram slowly fills up till i get mem errors i wish there was something i could use to free up unused ram again

 

[Midnightangel]

One of the biggest problems I see with memory defraggers, is that the peeps who use them are convinced that it will suddenly give them more memory, but the best way to get more system memory is PURCHASE IT! RAM is still one of the most cost effective upgrades for any computer system.

lmao i remember the guy some months ago who downloaded a proggy called free128 or something(it supposed to free 128meg of ram), and the guy only had 64meg and was bitchen about not getting the extra ram when he ran the program lol .

I use memturbo with XP home and it does seam to do a little good when i have run alot of memory intensive programs, but i agree that nothing really beats a good old reboot.