Ram optimizers/defragmenters myth or not?

A friend of mine just recently told me that he has found a new way to boost his pc performance and right away he showed a program that optimizes/defragments physical ram. I was about to download it when I saw one of the members of this forum contending that ram optimizers/defragmenters actually slows down pc rather than boost it's performance.

now i'm confused. Thus, i created this poll to gather ideas from this forum.

Are these programs that promises to boost performance by defragmenting or optimizing ram actually boost performance? or are these only a bunch of tricks?

 

I'd classify them as placebos, as most of the other optimizers out there, including HD defragmenters (which show noticeable improvement only in extreme cases).

 

Not possible, laughably wrong. Don't bother with it.

 

Hi qohelet,
I did such a post yesterday, so maybe you were reffering to me? I just never saw any improvement, and sometimes those programs are very aggresively advertised for nothing. I understand that someone had some improvement, but that would also mean that he had a very bad memory situation beforehands - meaning too little memory, too many TSRs, too many services etc... Just having a bit more memory or understanding how all that fancy programs use main memory and deciding not to have every single AV and Antispyware running will probably greatly enhance the performance. As I did in that other post I will write it now: It is only my personal suggestion. For some hard evidence check Internet, XP Myths would be a good start because it busts some of the strongest myths by giving the source where you can check how something works. If the source is Microsoft... well... I guess they know how the pagefile works? (not in connection to ram optimizers of course)

Cheers,

 

A few weeks ago I had only 15gb free on my HDD when I had to reinstall Microsoft Office. First I installed the Office package and then the next day I burnt 10 dvds and freed more than 40gb. At that point I felt the HDD needs rearrangement because Microsoft Word opened slowly and Excel even more so. I did notice an improvement after defragmenting the HDD!
I agree however, that some years ago defragmenting used to have greater impact. The faster HDD drives today benefit less from defrg programs than did the slow HDDs in 1999, no doubt about that.

 

I maybe referring to you. I read xp myths article and it blatantly agrees that those ram optimizers are not for real. However, it has skimpy explanation and so I did some checking myself and i found this elaborate explanation about this particular topic. Here is the link:

http://www.bitsum.com/winmemboost.asp

THe article is entitled: "The Truth Abouth Windows Memory Optimizers."

 

Hi qohelet,

Thanks for the link - it is actually very good. Much better than those myths page. I usually recommend people to read that XP myth page just to see how many of them are on the same place. Many are well described in Microsoft Knowledge base and MSDN. This article is even harsher than I expected! Good reading - thanks.

Cheers,

 

I suggest to make an experiment:

Take superpi test at 16M or 32M, so that a lot of RAM is used (or 4-8M, if don't have more than 512M installed) and run it several times.

Then call RAM defragmenter like BIONIC... run it to defragment, and run superpi test several times
with defragmentation.

Compare the results, draw conclusions and share them with us.

I have seen a minor improvement, thought it could be hardly noticeable in practice.

 

Ikovac

You're welcome!

Ivar
I'll try to experiment. wait for my conclusions.

 

RAM Optimizers = No

Hard drive De-fragmenters = Yes

 

Bah, that article said all the stuff I was going to say...

Well, I guess I'll take the easy way out then, and say the article is right.

There's nothing these memory optimizers can do that isn't either already done, or which just shouldn't be done.

As said above, pushing data out of RAM and into the pagefile is a horrible idea, unless you want to lower performance. Yes, it does make your "free RAM" figure look better, but I'd say performance is much more important. And that goes down, because everything suddenly has to be loaded from the harddrive again when needed. While a program may seem to load faster immediately after you performed this "optimization", it doesn't come close to outweighing the time wasted on the optimization in the first place.
Normally, a program being loaded might force, say, 50MB of data to be paged out. That takes a bit of time to do, obviously.
So to improve on this, you run a RAM optimizer first, which pages everything out, not just 50MB. That obviously takes even longer to do. But once it's done, the application won't need to page out those 50MB when it loads because there's already plenty of free physical RAM. So in the short term, you first waste a lot of time, then save a little bit of time. So overall, you waste time.

In the longer term then?
Well, after the program has loaded, Windows is still going to need to occasionally access all the data that has been paged out. Normally, *most* of this would be in physical memory, but our RAM optimizer threw it all out into the pagefile. So now every time older data has to be accessed, it has to be read from the harddrive, which again wastes a ton of time.

Overall then? You've wasted vastly more time than you saved on your program's load time. Short term, it's a waste. Long term, it's a disaster.

 

I voted yes ( not really) because I also believe ( not really) in perpetual motion.