Hibernate performance

Ok... not sure if this is in the right place, but here is what I am wondering about. How long do you think hibernation would take with 2 GB of RAM (or 3 if anyone could relate) with specs like my notebook? I'm just wondering about that... because otherwise, buying more RAM is always good!

 

I would not recommend deciding whether or not to upgrade your RAM based upon how long hibernate takes, unless for some crazy reason it is a matter of life and death. Hibernate will always take a non-trivial amount of time, as you have to write a bunch of data to the HDD. I'd say just get the RAM upgrade.

 

Well, I don't need an upgrade right now. I do use hibernate a lot, though, and I'm wondering what the difference would be. Thanks anyway.

 

My guess would be that it would have less to do with how much RAM you have as it would with how much RAM is actually being used when you enter hibernate. You could test that for yourself now. It'd actually be interesting to see what you found.

 

Windows doesn't try to analyze RAM contents so the hiberfil.sys file will always be the same size as your RAM, at least in XP. The only thing that can speed up hibernate would be a quicker HD.

 

Is there a way to have Vista tells the progress of hibernation before it actually hibernates, rather than leaving it as black blank screen? XP has this but Vista just left it as a blank screen. Its much more nicer because at least I know that my notebook is hibernating at a certain progress.

With your specs, I think the hibernation performance is rather good, I had a much lower spec and the hibernation is not bad at all. BTW, IINM, I don't think RAM means much because the hibernation image is stored in the HDD, no?

 

More RAM = more work for the HD when you hibernate.

 

Is there a technical explanation for that, or is in just urban legend? Your hybernate FILE would have to be the same size as RAM, but the amount of data written out to disk wouldn't. The OS knows which parts of RAM are being used and which aren't, so if hybernate is done by the OS (which I would assume it is, unless it is actually supported at the hardware level), it should be able to easily only write out the memory marked as taken, which would mean that more RAM wouldn't necessitate longer hybernate times.

 

What? you think it just writes a partial file and simply says the filesize is equal to the RAM size?

 

It takes about 15 - 20 secs on my laptp to hibernate and I have 3 GB of RAM and who cares? I just press hibernate and then forget it

 

It reserves a space on the harddrive that is large enough to store all data in RAM should all of RAM be in use. Yes, the file is equal to the size of all RAM, but that does not necessitate that the entire size of the file be written every time the file is used. I understand if you don't understand what I'm trying to say, but don't imply I'm stupid because you don't understand what I'm saying. Provide proof that the entire file has to be written over every time, or don't say anything.

 

What? you think the OS has to write every byte to the file, even for areas of RAM that aren't currently being used? Why would it need to do so?

Gary