"Browsing with lightspeed" (up to 50% faster. Small part also applies to games. )

I found some interesting information during the last months, which I wanted to pass along in form of this comprehensive guide. It contains links that explain the usage of a RAM Disk for the browser-cache or also install the browser completely towards the RAM. RAM is very cheap since some years, and it's multiple times faster than the fastest SSD. Using a RAM Disk may very well speed up the browsing experience by 20-25%!
The 2nd part is less complicated but therefore can even fasten up browsing more greatly (can also be slightly less, but at least 15% are almost garantueed) , and it has the interesting option of un-censoring your internet. Note, that this will get very nerdy, but you'll love it ^^ . Tip: Read 'til the end first, before you click on those links because it's way too much, and with reading my text, you'll know exactly what you need to know from that site.

Link 1: Guide on installing a RAM Disk and on how to make the necessary browser adjustments .

Link to the fastest currently available RAM Disk . If you need an alternative, you'll find benchmarks of RAM Disks here (note, that not all of them are free. The Softperfect RAM Disk is not only the fastest, it also doesn't cost anything. )

More info on hard-links (not only interesting for using a RAM Disk, but also for general disk and file-management. If you haven't touched the links above yet: Hard-links create a 2nd link towards a file stored on the disk, so it doesn't double files or anything, it simply makes a file accessable from two locations. Just imagine, that the file that you actually see in the Explorer, is actually a link towards the part of the hard-disk where the information is stored. Hard-links are simply two links towards the same source. This is of great use, if installing something on the hard-disk ,and then moving parts of it towards a RAM Drive, as the program then can still access everything normally, while the files are actually permanently in the RAM. Pro-gamers i. e. use this, to outsource the most heavily used textures of the game they play, as copying the whole game often doesn't make sense or is even impossible. )

Link Shell Extension (Don't learn all of that command-prompt-language and simply use the best tool to create symbolic links, junctions, hard-links and anything of the like with 2 clicks in the Explorer. Also has a nice extra feature of making the Explorer show more information on where a file is actually in reality. Windows Explorer should have that feature for long already, but for not understandable reasons, Microsoft just didn't deliver it yet. )

I decided for the Soft Perfect RAM Disk which I use to outsource Chrome Canary completely, which is slightly easier than doing the same with Chrome Stable. If you've read all of the above, and think this is too complicated, it's actually really really simple. You install whatever you want completely normally, you choose what you want to have in the RAM, you create a RAM Disk with the option of saving it as an image, you move the data onto the RAM Disk, click "link source" , go to the initial folder, click "drop link" , done (additional help: If you choose the same as I did, so move Canary completely on the RAM Disk and set its size to 1GB, you should limit Canary's Cache to 512MB or maybe a little bigger. Simply add " --disk-cache-size=52428800" to the shortcut without the "" ) .


Part II:

If you know what a DNS is, skip this paragraph. If you don't: DNS stands for "Domain Name Server" . That's that server, that actually navigates to 8.8.8.8, when you actually type google.com, because humans cannot remember such weird numbers, which is why names were given to the sites, the DNS translates those names into machine language.
Normally, two DNS's are assigned towards you by your ISP. The problem: Your ISP's DNS's are not necessarily the fastest ones, and they even may get censored, because your ISP doesn't want you to visit certain sites. Solution: Change the DNS (manual) .
There are three approaches to me, that make sense:

1. Very good speed for minimal time-investment: Simply enter 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4 as DNS in the adapter, those belong to Google, they're extremely fast and work always.

2. Take the ones from OpenNIC. Those only have 99% uptime, but as you can specify as many DNS's as you want, chances to get into the situation where i. e. the four DNS's they advise are all down simultaniously are negligable. The advantage of OpenNIC DNS's are, that (afaik) , they don't log anything, and (again afaik) they also don't limit where you may go by blocking sites. Simply entering those numbers again takes you 2 minutes. I haven't tested OpenNIC intensely enough to report about how often it's needed to update the DNS, I've used the last ones for half a year and then switched to again different DNS's which aren't publically available.

3. Don't care about censorship or logging, simply choose the fastest DNSs. Finding out which ones those are takes your PC between 30 and 60 minutes and the best tool to benchmark the DNS's around you is DNS Bench. That tool tests some thousands of DNS's while it runs, and simply tells you, which the fastest DNS's are for you in the end.

Ofc., you can also research yourself, there are i. e. also options to reduce adds in the internet by choosing special DNS's, there are DNS's of anti-virus-firms like Comodo, that do anti-phishing and anti-malware-checks for you and the like.


The great benefit of all of this is, that it really fastens up browsing very noticeably: In my case i. e., I got offered 21% faster DNS's by DNS Bench and the faster starting up of Chrome one really feels! Faster browsing not only means more time, it especially means less stress, because it's a major difference, if sites need 2s to load, or only 1s .

I hope that you found this interesting .

 

Using Google DNS for someone like me who lives in Dubai is actually much slower since the Google Servers are very far from me geographically so it would take more time to resolve a host name. Might be good for others living in Europe or the USA/Canada.

As for RAM Disks, I never liked the idea because I know when I restart all my cookies and what not will be cleared since they were not saved locally.

Thirdly, a game may load faster from a RAM disk but it won't run any faster. It has to be loaded into RAM and then it's all about the GPU to do the magic.

 

I didn't know that. I thought Google had DNS-Servers everywhere.

I don't understand, what you mean with that. If you choose the option to save the data on the RAM Disk in an image, the only situation in which I could imagine that you lose data is, when a system crashes, before that data is written. It's good that you mention this though, because using a RAM Disk also offers the option to intentionally not save the data on it. Like that, the browser cache would get deleted at every reboot, which would offer additional security.
And no idea, for what you need cookies, as I personally try to block them as much as possible and delete all of them at every shutdown. If it's about you staying logged in somewhere, logging in is two additional clicks at most. Better imo. than getting traced the whole time.

No game runs completely from the RAM @Matrix Leader, they all need to load information again and again. If a game would run completely in the RAM, you wouldn't see your disk getting accessed once while playing it. And sry to correct you, but putting certain textures or even a whole game into the RAM comes with a noticeable performance increase. I know this for certain, because I put CIV4 on a 4GB RAM Disk and tested it, so I i. e. stopped the time it takes to cycle from the first city towards the last. I repeated that test several times, and in general, time needed was halved when running CIV from the RAM Disk, so in that situation, it was a 50% reduce in latency. Performance increase not necessarily is always that large, but theoretically, even more is possible, because RAM can easily be 4 times as fast as an SSD.

Get over your doubts and try it .

 

Regarding the Gooogle DNS Server, please read this: Why You Might Want to Stick With Your ISP's DNS Server After All


thanks for the corrections regarding the game performance.


As for cookies, I like cookies because I have over 30 sites that I logon to and imagine if the cookies were cleared, it's a big hassle to relogin to everyone of them, Give meh teh cook!3s brah!

 

Am using openDNS, as my isp dns struggles sometimes. Will test opennic, and see how it fares, Thanks for the tip.