Run FFXI from a RAM Drive

Hello,

I'm getting a new (to me) computer with 48GB of RAM.  Yeah, I know cool . . .  Now what to do with it.  While I will need some of it for my work, I'm coming from a system with 8GB and thus even if I double my usage, I still have several GB of RAM left over.

After reading about experienes with RAM drives (and SSD) and FFXI, I'm impressed by the speed.  Several people were talking about the zoning speed being .5 to 1 second, plus extremely high FPS rates.

So, what I'd like to know from anyone running FFXI on a:

  A) SSD?  What's it like?  is it as good I read?

  Ram Drive?  What's it like?  How do you handle upates, having the game on a HDD, but running from the ram drive?

The people who were discussing FFXI on a ram drive, didn't go into how they did it -- sigh.

ANOTHER THOUGHT:  As I understand it, Windows 7 uses extra ram to cache files.  OK, is there a way to get / force Windows 7 to cache FFXI files?

Thanks! :-)

I. B. Halliwell on Ragnarok (formerly of Caitsith)

An SSD will dramatically improve load times, but you're not going to get any benefit from your 48 GB or RAM with an SSD, it's a piece of hardware attached to the motherboard with a SATA cable just like a normal HDD. A RAM drive will improve load times even more since you skip the SATA bus, leaving just the FSB/HT/QPI between the RAM and the CPU. The problem with RAM drives is they're volatile; once the PC turns off anything saved on the RAM drive is gone. Some RAM drive utilities will keep a backup on your HDD, but this isn't universal, so you would need to check the documentation. There are some hardware RAM drives that pair a SSD with RAM, most of these plug into a PCIe slot so that they can make full use of the RAM (SATA is too slow), but these are very expensive.

As for your thought about the Windows 7 file cache, there's no way to guarantee that Windows will keep FFXI in the cache. However, if you regularly load FFXI right after booting, Windows will preload the files needed for POL and FFXI initial load. It's not going to load the whole game into the file cache, but once it has loaded a specific file it will try to keep that file in the cache as long as it can to speed up subsequent loads. Your best bet is to pair an SSD with Windows' built-in file cache, and to not worry too much about "using" all of that RAM; just having it will improve performance. More RAM means Windows won't need to page out programs as often, and it will be able to keep more files in the cache.

Also, don't listen to anyone who tells you to disable the pagefile because it "improves performance". It does no such thing, in fact it can very dramatically hurt performance since it removes Windows' ability to page out programs that are sitting idle¹ to make room for caching the stuff you're working on right now.

1. You know... like all of those services running in the background. Oh, and don't shut them off either... lots of bad advice on the internet from people who don't know what any of these things actually do.

Thank you for your reply.

Yup, I'm not looking at a SSD, but I am hoping the extra RAM can help out.  Turns out my Son got a Dell laptop EXCHANGE and went from a L502X at 8B to an Alienware 17 at 32GB.  Thus I was thinking his system would, also, benefit from a RAM drive.  Why?

The Alienware hard drive rates at 5.9 (Windows Experience), while the RAM is at 7.8.  Obviously, the RAM drive would be so much quicker for him.  Yet, how does one have PlayOnline update the HDD copy and have FFXI run from a RAM drive?  (Also I wonder how long ti would take to copy FFXI from the HDD to the RAM drive, but that could be in the background at boot time - except after an update.)

Anyone have an idea how to have FFXI run from one location, but update to another?  Maybe there is a 3rd party application to intercept I/O to a directory and reroute to another one?  Just thinking outloud.

Thanks!

The Alienware hard drive rates at 5.9 (Windows Experience), while the RAM is at 7.8.  Obviously, the RAM drive would be so much quicker for him.

This is comparing apples and oranges. A 5 rating for RAM is not the same as a 5 rating for the HDD. They have wildly different performance characteristics. Also, you shouldn't put much weight in the Windows Experience ratings, they're not very accurate. I've heard of cases where people have had SSD RAID 0¹ setups getting well over 1GB/s serial reads and writes only scoring a 6 or 7. Microsoft doesn't document how the ratings are calculated, making it difficult to compare scores.

Yet, how does one have PlayOnline update the HDD copy and have FFXI run from a RAM drive? ... Anyone have an idea how to have FFXI run from one location, but update to another?

You don't. You just set up the RAM drive, and use it like any other drive in the system. If your RAM drive utility can do automatic backups then it will handle keeping the HDD copy in sync with the RAM. However you should be aware that a power failure could easily corrupt the backup if there are pending unflushed writes.

Also I wonder how long ti would take to copy FFXI from the HDD to the RAM drive, but that could be in the background at boot time - except after an update.

This is hard to calculate, but assuming a fairly typical average of 150 MB/s sequential reads for a 7200 RPM drive, it would take
about 1 minute to copy a 10 GB FFXI install from the HDD into the RAM drive, excluding file system overhead. More realistically you might expect it to take 90-120 s, or possibly much longer if there's drive contention.

Yup, I'm not looking at a SSD...

You may want to reconsider. I really don't recommend RAM drives, they're a lot more trouble than they're worth, and you just end up wasting a whole lot of RAM that could otherwise go toward the file cache, or some other use. Like I said in my last post, just having the RAM improves the performance of the entire system. Whether you actively make use of it or not, Windows will. An SSD gives you fast, non-volatile storage. You wouldn't use it for everything, a traditional HDD is perfect for things like documents, music, videos and other data. Save the SSD for the OS, games and other programs.

1. RAID 0 is the fastest setup, but has no redundancy, so if any of the drives fail the whole array fails. It's popular among gamers, as a drive failure is generally not a catastrophe (you'd just have to reinstall all your games). It's not generally used commercially, except in some non-mission-critical applications, like as a file cache; RAID 5 or 6 is usually used instead for mission-critical applications. Some gamers use RAID 0+1 which gives similar performance to RAID 0, but can tolerate a single drive failure like RAID 5, however RAID 0+1 requires 4 identical drives.

Thank you again for your insight and quick reply. :-)

I'm looking at Primo-Ramdisk by Romex Software

http://www.romexsoft...html#delay-load

They have several options to keep the HDD in sync with the ramdrive even one to help with power hits.

I've not decided, but thought someone here would already be using a ram drive with FFXI and would share their experience.

I might be the first and if so, I'll be sharing my experience (for the next person).

Thanks!

This is comparing apples and oranges.

Seems like hes got the fruits mixed up a bit.

Don't take any of this negatively, but I'm not sure you really understand how computers work IBH.

There is a difference between RAM and Storage drives like SSD and HDD. What Iry said about RAM drives is true, you should disregard RAM drives.

I have never seen a 48GB RAM set up but did you mean 64GB? Anyways lets just say 32GBs(4 sticks of 8GB of ram.) This is excessive even for a gaming desktop(as well as a waste of money.) I really don't feel any gaming rig needs more than 16GBs of ram(ESPECIALLY for FFXI), After a certain point RAM is just going to allocate way more space for EVERYTHING than ANYTHING really needs(its going to look like it is using more than it really is.) RAM can dramaticly effect computer performance(if your going from 2 to 8GB for instance) but there is a point were it is becomes redundent to how much more you add. Alocating some of your RAM to work like storage instead of data caching(the purpose of random access memory) is silly. I understand how fast RAM is but it is over kill. If you got the money to drop on 32-64GBs of ram but want FAST load times DON'T get that much RAM. Buy 8-16GB of ram and buy something like the link below if you want FAST ASS loads(it also has a feature that uses RAM.)

http://www.newegg.co...N=-1&isNodeId=1

Windows experience index has inaccuracies and regardless shouldn't substitute a healthy education of your computer hardware, you should know for yourself how good your hardware is. However you don't seem to understand the relevancy of each peice of hardware based on how you are relating them with windows index. Also Idk about how these people are saying any kind of RAM is boosting FPS.... RAM system requirement for FFXI is 512MB and thats concidering an entire windows XP system along side it, FFXI is not resource intensive and your RAM will not effect its load times what so ever.

Do not forsake SSDs. There is most definately a HUGE difference between a decent SATA III SSD and the best SATA III HDDs. I got a couple year old Corsair Force 3 SSD(550 read/500write) it was the difference between night and day compared to the old 7200rpm WD I had. The SSD in the link is a PCIe 830MB/s read 810MB/s write, its a beast and well worth it if you got the money, especially the open box one (if it comes with a 30 day warranty.)

Btw do you know anything about the processor or the graphics card in this computer your getting? These are extremely important components that you do not seem to be focusing on. Both will effect load times and your FPS. Though once again FFXI is not resource intensive. It really seems like you are getting misinformed/confused with information on the internet or maybe by who ever is selling you this PC.

Edit: Also load times are weird for me with FFXI. I think the FFXI servers bottleneck zone loads because I load zones faster on FFXIV.

16 GB are nowhere near enough for me, 32 GB might be, but 64 GB is the only sane option for my needs. And that isn't considering any games at all. All depends on your needs

RAM drives can make sense for certain applications. Personally I don't think FFXI is one of them, because load times don't seem to be hurting the game much, so spending a lot of time and money (or even any time and money) on it would not be a wise choice in my opinion, but if that is worth it to you, you can consider it. But as was pointed out before, load times are throttled by the server in some situations, despite the zone being fully loaded locally already (like when leaving the MH after changing jobs, the zone will load but you'll be unable to perform any action until the home point dialogue appears, which is sent by the server after the inventory loads). So it will not always have the effect that you're looking for.

That said, the 512 MB requirement did not consider Windower, which can alone consume hundreds of MB in regular operation. Just loading the item resources will take up over 10MB, and that is copied for every addon that uses them. If you consider multiboxing as well and maybe having a few other programs running, the total will cost you several GB of memory.

Also, RAM drives do have a significant performance boost over even PCIe SSDs, as (depending on the type of RAM) they can get up to 10 GB/s of throughput (and this is somewhat outdated information, Idk what the current standards are at). So while I don't see it being worth it in this case, personally, the argument for RAM drives as situational tools is still very valid.

Finally, one last point about the FPS, that statistic is not tied to load times, so comparing them here is a bit misleading. And like RAM, FPS recommendations do not consider Windower, which can do a lot of things on each frame (especially since the introduction of Lua addons that use the "prerender" event). Coupled with the naturally higher resolution than when the game was released (which is a significant increase in computational requirements, and a lot more so if supersampling is enabled), it's not surprising that even somewhat modern PCs have trouble rendering FFXI at constant 60 FPS in certain situations (lots of effects, especially special effects like confluxes and telepoints, but also effect spam in alliance battles).

Yeah I understand what you mean about RAM. I should of spoken more in the perspective I was given. I was expecting to get corrections from either you or Iryo lol. I don't do any high consumption tasks, no music software, graphics software, small server, etc. I mean from a gamer/casual user perspective, I use 3 instances of FFXI or 1 instance of FFXI and 1 instance of FFXIV. Then FFXI related things I will not mention, steam, winamp, VLC player, skype, tons of tabs on mozilla, anti-virus, utorrent, libre, some other misc stuff aswell, and of course everything else Windows has going on. 8GB of ram does not present any problem infact when I upgraded from 4GB 1333Mhz to 8GB 1600Mhz, I didnt see much of a difference.

Over to the oranges, I did however see a huge difference when upgrading to a SATA III SSD. For instance, starting the computer and being on the desktop fully loaded is about 20 secs, if that. On the windows 7 load screen before login, the windows logo animation doesnt even complete before its done, nevermind staring at it for a moment after it does like with my old HDD(there are faster HDD than the one I had as a boot drive, basic Western Didgital 7200rpm.) As for RAM drives I was primarily focusing on it in use for FFXI.

I don't quite know the specifics but there is definately some core issues with FFXI and it rendering to your machines capacity. Theres some rusty piping. Anyways a low budget haswell pentium laptop with integrated graphics, 4GB ram, and a SSD boot/program drive can run 2 instances of FFXI with windower aswell as other things w/o much of any struggle. There will be framerate drops for things Arcon mentioned though of course. Definately won't be able to use the Unlimiter plugin for 60fps though. I did this for a bit while my desktop was down at one point and also had a 1920x1080 monitor connected to the laptop along with the 1366x768 laptop screen.