Running game from ramdisk


 

Posted

I have ordered a new computer (finally) and one of the specs it has is 12 gigs of ram. I intend to carve off 3-4 gigs of this as a ram disk; and play the game from there. Does anyone have experience doing this with CoH specifically?

I intend to have a couple of batch files one to copy the game data to the ram disk at boot, and to copy the game data to hard drive at game exit.

Other than that if anyone has done this and has any advice I am all ears; else I'll report back with how it worked for me, and try to gather some empirical data as to over all game improvement.

The reasoning is it seems that the disk i/o is obnoxiously high, and lode times when changing zone are long some times up to a full minute. If I can greatly decrease the disk i/o time I should see significant improvements in load times.


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Posted

I doubt it will make much difference except for the first zone as rezoning is cached by the game and Windows will cache reads otherwise.

Its harmless to try it out though.


 

Posted

The inital hit of copying the game over to the ramdrive is going to take a little time, whatever 2G will take.

After that, the loading times of the game starting, and the zones, will be a LOT better. But that is all you'll see. The actual game syncing to the servers will not change, nor will any in game activities. Just initial load and zone loads.


August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
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Posted

I see a good deal of disk activity while playing, so I am thinking I will see "some" improvement outside of the zone loading times, but yes I imagine the most significant improvement will be there.

I should have all the parts in, and start testing this by Sunday.


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Posted

Ok, so I got my rig set up and I have yet to pull any empirical data yet (to busy actually playing) but I can say that running the game from a ram disk the game does load noticeably faster, most zones do seem to load faster, tho it doesn't look like zoning to the sg base is any faster.

the ITF still lags a bit on the 3rd mission, however RWZ raids seem improved over running the game from the Hard Disk.

If anyone really wants the actual load time numbers I'll attempt to get them as accurate as I can. But I feel that if you have 4 gigs of ram to spare this is a noticeable improvement.


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Posted

Hm. Yeah, I forgot to think about about various swaps about sounds and such, so that makes a lot of sense... can't have *everything* loaded, right?

Kewlies, though, sounds like it does what you wanted, overall...

I remember BillZ had done one of those Gigabyte IDrives or whatever it was, where it ran something like 4G of ddr (ddr2?) in a card and made it a 'hard drive'... pretty much the same deal as what you're seeing, except he also, I think had the system on it too? (it has an external power supply) and it was wicked fast at loading Windows.... I could be misremembering though.


August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
most zones do seem to load faster, tho it doesn't look like zoning to the sg base is any faster.

[/ QUOTE ]
That makes sense since the server has to load the base, just like an instanced mission, before you can enter. Try this: have someone ALREADY in the base, THEN you enter and see if it loads any faster.


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The Mentor Project

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Hm. Yeah, I forgot to think about about various swaps about sounds and such, so that makes a lot of sense... can't have *everything* loaded, right?

Kewlies, though, sounds like it does what you wanted, overall...

I remember BillZ had done one of those Gigabyte IDrives or whatever it was, where it ran something like 4G of ddr (ddr2?) in a card and made it a 'hard drive'... pretty much the same deal as what you're seeing, except he also, I think had the system on it too? (it has an external power supply) and it was wicked fast at loading Windows.... I could be misremembering though.

[/ QUOTE ]

The difference between the ram disk and an Idrive ( I looked into one, but not worth the price IMO) is that the Idrive is limited to the sata bus, this isn't.


so far I have continued to be impressed with my load times, I am no longer the last into a mission, and some times I am even first. and really that was my over all goal.


Card Carrying DeFulmenstrator--Member Crazy 88s
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Posted

??????

Ok....but I personally have been able to zone under those criteria (not last into mission, often first) simply by virtue of having adequate amounts of RAM in the first place, and with no need of a RAM disk, RAID, SSD, or any other exotic storage solutions.

Just sayin'


 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
I intend to have a couple of batch files one to copy the game data to the ram disk at boot, and to copy the game data to hard drive at game exit.

[/ QUOTE ]

There are ways to remove the need for copying back game data to the hd when you exit the game (and as a bonus also prevent you from losing data if the computer is shut down (e.g. from a crash) before you have a chance to copy the data).

The files that are changed by CoH tend to either don't be read back by the game (e.g. chat logs and screenshots), or gain limited benefit from increased transfer rates (e.g. locally stored Mission Architect files). This means that you'll gain very limited benefit from reading these files from a RAM Disk, and thus you lose little by leaving them on your hard disk.

The trick thus becomes to read *some* files from the RAM Disk, and *some* files from the hard disk.
You can do this using symlinks. Very simply put, a symlink points to another location (you can read more about symlinks in Windows here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link ). You can make a directory symlink that looks like a normal directory to applications (including CoH), but when things are written to that "directory" they actually end up in another location, a location that can be on a different disk (and correspondingly for reads).

In this case, you basically have two options.

1) Run the game from the RAM Disk, and make symlinks for the folders you want written to the HD (the stuff that's changed by the game).
2) Run the game from the HD, and make symlinks for the things you want to read from the RAM Disk (the stuff that benefits from better read performance).

Since there are lots of folders that contain things that are changed by the game (screenshots, logs, demorecords, the various MA directories...), and few things that really benefit from better read performance (mainly the piggs directory structure), I'd probably personally go with option 2), since it'd be far simpler to set up.

Basically:
1) Move the piggs folder to another location.
2) Make symlink that replaces the pigg folder, pointing to where you'll put the pigg folder on the RAM Disk.
3) copy the piggs folder from the HD to the RAM Disk

The only step that has to be repeated after every computer restart (or play session if you delete the files each time you're done playing) is step 3). There is no need to copy things back to the HD when you're done playing (except for when a patch has been applied). Other benefits (compared to transferring the entire CoH directory structure back and forth) is that you won't lose data from unexpected computer restarts, and that you won't have to copy as much data to the RAM Drive each time (saves both time and space (memory)).

If you feel that there are other folders/files that would also benefit from being on the RAM Disk, you can of course also make symlinks for those.


 

Posted

I am using a ram disk solution that hs a feature where writes a disk image to the HD periodically, I set it to write it at 8 am during the maintenance window. so far it has worked really well. I have yet to force a crash, or pull the plug to test things but worse case senerio I copy from backup and re-patch if there has been a patch and go from there.


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We burn more Influence before 8am than you make all day.