Optimizing RAM disk for a lot of small files

Started by LoadingTimeMan

LoadingTimeMan

Optimizing RAM disk for a lot of small files   18 June 2020, 01:00

Hey Guys,
first of all I want to say I am not a big tech guy. I play a computer game called Path of Exile and I want to archive really fast loading times.
Using a RAMDisk I thought is kinda mandatory since it seems to have a LOT faster loads and reads compared to my SSD. So I went ahead and downloaded RAMDisk software and put the game on the newly created RAM disk. Sad thing though it didn't really improve my loading times.

I think this might have to do not with the way RAM disk works, but rather how the game files are stored. In the game folder there is one really big archive (something like .rar or .zip) and in there are around 100000 small files.

From my understanding my CPU still needs to extract the needed files from the archive and then put them back on my RAM disk. So basically it is moving the files from RAM to RAM. The archive is around 25GB. I assume this whole process is bottlenecked by the speed of my CPU, which has to unpack the files from the archive and put them back in the RAM.

So what I figured was that the overall speed for big data transfer doesn't even matter, but rather the speed with which a lot of very small files can be transferred. I assume that RAM disk is a lot faster in moving files of multiple GBs around, but has the same speed copying thousands of small files as my SSD.

Does anyone have an idea if I can setup the RAM disk or the RAM on its own to support faster file transfer of a lot of really small files rather than big files?

P.S. Maybe all of this doesn't make sense at all... as I said I am not a software/hardware pro but this is what I imagine to be the issue.
Thanks for any ideas/help what I can try/test smile
SoftPerfect Support forum - Andrew avatar image

Re: Optimizing RAM disk for a lot of small files   18 June 2020, 12:19

It may be that the CPU is indeed the bottleneck, not the disk speed.

We generally do not recommend placing applications or games on RAM disk as there is little to no benefit. Please see this forum thread for detailed discussion.

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