ReadyBoost

[DarkSerge]

Hello.I've recently learned about a utility called ReadyBoost that comes in Windows Vista and 7. I've also read that you simulate a similar effect in Windows XP by setting your page file to a USB flash drive.Does anybody know about this and how well it actually works in speeding up an XP machine? I have a couple XP machines I wouldn't mind trying it out on if it works well enough.

[rbdietz]

Hello.I've recently learned about a utility called ReadyBoost that comes in Windows Vista and 7. I've also read that you simulate a similar effect in Windows XP by setting your page file to a USB flash drive.Does anybody know about this and how well it actually works in speeding up an XP machine? I have a couple XP machines I wouldn't mind trying it out on if it works well enough.

Putting XP's paging file on a USB flash drive might not be such a great idea.HDDs are a lot faster than USB/flash drives when doing long sequential I/O.From a Q&A session with Matt Ayers

From Matt Ayers: "I'm the Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group and own the ReadyBoost feature. I wanted to give some offical answers based on the excellent questions and discussions that I've seen in this blog, to date. Also, I'll be using this as a starting point for the official ReadyBoost FAQ. Overall, as many posters have pointed out, the feature is designed to improve small random I/O for people who lack the expansion slots, money, and or technical expertise to add additional RAM. As y'all know, adding RAM is still the best way to relieve memory pressure. Thanks, again, for your interest, questions and ideas.

(Both red and blue emphasis is mine.)

Q: Isn't this just putting the paging file onto a flash disk?A: Not really - the file is still backed on disk. This is a cache - if the data is not found in the ReadyBoost cache, we fall back to the HDD.Q: Aren't Hard Disks faster than flash? My HDD has 80MB/sec throughput.A: Hard drives are great for large sequential I/O. For those situations, ReadyBoost gets out of the way. We concentrate on improving the performance of small, random I/Os, like paging to and from disk.Q: What happens when you remove the drive?A: When a surprise remove event occurs and we can't find the drive, we fall back to disk. Again, all pages on the device are backed by a page on disk. No exceptions. This isn't a separate page file store, but rather a cache to speed up access to frequently used data.Q: Isn't user data on a removable device a security risk?A: This was one of our first concerns and to mitigate this risk, we use AES-128 to encrypt everything that we write to the device.Q: Won't this wear out the drive?A: Nope. We're aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Our research shows that we will get at least 10+ years out of flash devices that we support.

[DarkSerge]

What about having the page file on an external hard drive?

[Tushman]

What about having the page file on an external hard drive?

Serge, what sort of websites have you been reading lately? :)I wouldn't put much credence into any of that rubbish.You may have misread or misunderstood whatever website or article you read. Moving the page file to another physical hard drive can yield some performance improvement. But you definitely do not (should not) move it to an external drive. That's just foolery!Also, keep in mind that moving the page file to another physical hard drive has a drawback. That is the operating system cannot create a crash dump if you do so. If you've never analyzed a crash dump or that doesn't matter to you, then go for it. Edited August 27, 2010 by Tushman

[lewmur]

Putting XP's paging file on a USB flash drive might not be such a great idea.HDDs are a lot faster than USB/flash drives when doing long sequential I/O.From a Q&A session with Matt Ayers(Both red and blue emphasis is mine.)

Hmmm, seems like the article is saying that paging isn't normally "large sequential I/O," and that therefore, lacking "the real thing," XP users might gain some speed by placing the pagefile on a flash drive. I don't see where it would hurt to try it and judge for yourself.

[alphaomega]

[quote name='lewmur' post='303724' date='Aug 27 2010, 08:49 AM']Hmmm, seems like the article is saying that paging isn't normally "large sequential I/O," and that therefore, lacking "the real thing," XP users might gain some speed by placing the pagefile on a flash drive. I don't see where it would hurt to try it and judge for yourself.[/quote]see if this old thread helps:[url="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CCMQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fforum.notebookreview.com%2Fwindows-os-software%2F150615-readyboost-xp-yes-xp.html&ei=LdZ3TMeNMMSqlAfLpqDsCw&usg=AFQjCNHbm_FvevwG-M1w4X0mXkISGv2vLw"]readyboost in..xp! yes xp![/url] In particular post #23 and #26. Edited August 27, 2010 by alphaomega

[rbdietz]

Hmmm, seems like the article is saying that paging isn't normally "large sequential I/O," and that therefore, lacking "the real thing," XP users might gain some speed by placing the pagefile on a flash drive. I don't see where it would hurt to try it and judge for yourself.

The article is about ReadyBoost as implemented in Vista. And paging files are only mentioned peripherally. (Implementation in Win7 is very similar to Vista, but the ReadyBoost cache can be spread across multiple flash drives and be much large in size - especially in 64 bit Windows.While Window's paging file is managed in 4k pages, the actual I/O doesn't necessarily happen just one 4k block at a time.

1. When Windows has occasion to suddenly write out say, an 8 megabyte (2048 4K pages) chunk of memory to the paging file - eg. in order to free up some physical memory for the additional program you're trying to launch - you'll see long sequential I/O.In this circumstance, having your paging file on a flash drive would be much, much, much slower than almost any internal HD and horribly, obviously slower for the user. (Almost any - 'cause the internal HD could be +95% full and horribly, insanely fragmented.)
2. On the other hand, when several different programs are running; physical memory is largely consumed; and each program is touching different portions of it's allocated memory on a more or less random basis, you'll also see lots of separate, random 4k paging file I/O operations.In this later circumstance, paging to a USB drive would likely be significantly faster than to an internal HD, but the difference in speed would also likely to be much less obvious to the user.

Having said all that, it's always fun to experiment. But if you decide to try, I suggest you use ReadyBoost compatible flash memory if at all possible. - Find someone with a Win7 or Vista machine to test it for you.HTH Good luck

[lewmur]

The article is about ReadyBoost as implemented in Vista. And paging files are only mentioned peripherally. (Implementation in Win7 is very similar to Vista, but the ReadyBoost cache can be spread across multiple flash drives and be much large in size - especially in 64 bit Windows.While Window's paging file is managed in 4k pages, the actual I/O doesn't necessarily happen just one 4k block at a time.

1. When Windows has occasion to suddenly write out say, an 8 megabyte (2048 4K pages) chunk of memory to the paging file - eg. in order to free up some physical memory for the additional program you're trying to launch - you'll see long sequential I/O.In this circumstance, having your paging file on a flash drive would be much, much, much slower than almost any internal HD and horribly, obviously slower for the user. (Almost any - 'cause the internal HD could be +95% full and horribly, insanely fragmented.)
2. On the other hand, when several different programs are running; physical memory is largely consumed; and each program is touching different portions of it's allocated memory on a more or less random basis, you'll also see lots of separate, random 4k paging file I/O operations.In this later circumstance, paging to a USB drive would likely be significantly faster than to an internal HD, but the difference in speed would also likely to be much less obvious to the user.

Having said all that, it's always fun to experiment. But if you decide to try, I suggest you use ReadyBoost compatible flash memory if at all possible. - Find someone with a Win7 or Vista machine to test it for you.HTH Good luck

OK, let's put this is perspective. HDD's have faster "read/write" times than flash. Flash has much faster "seek" (virtually 0) times than an HDD. So, when only one "seek" is required to process a large amount of data, the HDD is faster. But when you have a high number of "seeks," for a relatively small amunt of data, then the flash memory is faster. ReadyBoost is able to determine which is more advantageous for a given operation and use it.The XP user doesn't have ReadyBoost so they have to determine for themselves which function their pagefile is performing in their particular case. If they have plenty of RAM, then it probably won't make any difference one way or another.But let's take one example. Say you have a company netbook with low resources and you only run one app that does a lot of "data processing," and you find your HDD "churning" constantly. Putting the pagefile on a flash drive might be of considerable advantage. OTH, with that same netbook, you are constantly opening and closing large apps, and having to wait for what seems forever for them to open and close, then you definitely do NOT want to put the pagefile on the flash card.Of course, when USB 3 drives and adapters get cheap enough, the whole question becomes moot. Edited August 27, 2010 by lewmur

[DarkSerge]

I have an XP machine and a 7 machine. My XP machine runs fine, but I'm just curious really. I heard about it recently and wondered what it was all about. I have my page file on my XP machine set to my 1 TB internal drive instead of my system drive. I'm not too concerned with reading dump files. I've had to do it before but it's not needed often enough. Performance is pretty good as is.

[lewmur]

I have an XP machine and a 7 machine. My XP machine runs fine, but I'm just curious really. I heard about it recently and wondered what it was all about. I have my page file on my XP machine set to my 1 TB internal drive instead of my system drive. I'm not too concerned with reading dump files. I've had to do it before but it's not needed often enough. Performance is pretty good as is.

Rule of thumb, if your HDD isn't "churning," then moving the pagefile won't help.

[goretsky]

Hello,When I was using Microsoft Windows Vista, I found that ReadyBoost offered slight performance improvements on computer with 512MB of RAM. I didn't notice a performance improvement on systems with 1GB or more of RAM. That's subjective, though, so your experiences can—and likely will—differ.Regards,Aryeh Goretsky

[FuzzButt]

If you are super worried about read/write times and waiting then an SSD is the only way to go. I have an Intel X25M 80GB SSD on my Win7-x64 PC and it is awesome as a boot/program drive. It is 40-60MB faster than my already fast 0/1 RAID array where my data resides.

[lewmur]

If you are super worried about read/write times and waiting then an SSD is the only way to go. I have an Intel X25M 80GB SSD on my Win7-x64 PC and it is awesome as a boot/program drive. It is 40-60MB faster than my already fast 0/1 RAID array where my data resides.

Do you really think someone running XP is willing to fork over the price of an SSD? This whole thread is about what an XP user, with LIMITED resources can do to speed things up without even increasing RAM.

[FuzzButt]

I run XP on my laptop and my wife's PC. One because I have to the other because of hardware issues. The RAM is maxed on the laptop and I'd do what ever I could to get it faster. Even putting in a $230 SSD.