There are a number of recent discussion threads on the topic. Just enter ramdisk in the search box.

Splitting is not possible, that is, the boinc agent software can be installed in the normal place and the boinc datadir to your ramdisk, but no subdivision of the datadir.

Hopefully all coming and future projects make use of symbol linked set-up of task slots. This way only one master copy exists of the application software. Currently for cep2 a full copy is created for each task started. Mcm is the first one using symbol linking. Not paid attention if the coming ugm does too. Hope so.

fragiggle wrote:
Thanks for sharing this RAM Disk utility.
I was using RAMDisk from Dataram Corporation, but their free version is limited to 4GB.
With Dataram version I could run only 2 CEP's together and with some hanky panky 3, when I first loaded the tasks on the normal HD and moved them before the start to RAMDisk.
SoftPerfect doesn't have a limit (other then available RAM ).
Now I created a RAM of 6144MB and can run 6 CEP's together. Asking for a 7th task, I got:

RAM 261 World Community Grid 10 Oct 13:21:38 Message from server: The Clean Energy Project - Phase 2 needs 480.24MB more disk space. You currently have 2079.76 MB available and it needs 2560.00 MB.

With 7GB RAM Disk (16GB total available), I suppose you may run 8 CEP's (8 threads on the i7 HT on)

I thought this was true initially, though my ram usage never goes above 4gb with system processes included. As far as I can tell CEP2 does all the work directly to the file, not to one in ram. My Hard drive I/O is always completely packed. this is why I am going this route.


You're welcome,
It took me a tad to find one that would go over 4gb and have a huge speed increase over the other. here was my most helpful source
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-disk-softw...est-read-and-write-speed/

Is that your total RAM usage, or just what's actively in use? In the windows 7 task manager it only shows what's actively in use, often with just as much marked as inactive/can be written to disk. If you're on Windows 8 it has a bar for both in task manager. If your running Windows 7 you need to open resource monitor (there's a link on the performance tab in task manager).

I believe CEP should only write to disk when checkpointing and when WU's start/end(not counting the above RAM discussion of course).


Lavaflow: I don't know if the 2 client method is efficient or not, I've just seen it mentioned when people were trying to run RAMDisk's before. I assume somewhere on the Internet exists a guide to do it, including the good points you made.

You know what, I never realized that the standard task manager only shows actively used ram. I have been using the performance monitor and that is how I noticed the big SSD usage. I have now educated myself better on this issue and have discovered something interesting.
I have 16 gb ram installed now and felt like this was the perfect time to do some experimenting. without reformatting my pc I just suspened everything, i think i rebooted but didn't make a note of it and got this result.

then I let boinc run for a bit and got this

then I tried a few things starting it, then deleting everything and putting it on a ramdisk then my whole computer wouldn't turn on. booted into linux and just deleted the ramdisk and tried again didn't work so I backed up my user file and that's it and reformatted everything. tried installing all updates, my standard security software and drivers. rebooting then setting a 6 gb ramdisk, installed boinc and everything appeared to be working great, but then system instability occured and I recieved a blue screen of death followed by a no boot, so I tried deleting the ramdisk again, this time with success. Now i'm on this system and just installed boinc regularly. During this I lost the screenshots I thought I had saved but just weren't there. It showed that the pagefile on the drive became the most used when nothing else was in use.
I just took a screenshot of my current results and it kind of surprises me what I see.

Before the reformat the ram usage was about the same but the standby was much less. I have recently observed the standby take up all the remaining ram, which doesn't seem to be a problem with my systems stability. I think going over this with a ramdisk may be why I experienced such bad issues. or it might be the ramdisk software. I believe that if I had more ram, like 32gb, there would be absolutely no issue with this.
but like always, I love to hear other viewpoints. So far I'm just looking at upgrading ram again (edit: and doing a ramdisk of 8gb) so I won't have to buy a new SSD anytime soon