Performance of 1GB of RAM and 16GB SSD pagefile?

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MatthewGB

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Jun 15, 2016
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Does anyone know of any benchmarks for the actual performance of SSD used as RAM, rather then as extra is it usually used? My motherboard only has 2 working DIMM's, and at DDR3 limits me to 16GB. While this ok for now, in the future could I rely on an SSD as extra RAM?
A useful scenario would be running W10 and some games as well, on 1GB of DDR3, and then an NVME or SATA3 SSD with a large pagefile and see how everything runs compared to 16GB of RAM.
Also, I'm ignoring Optane here as it's basically an overpriced NVME SSD with fancy software, and I can't run it on a Z68 mobo.
 
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If your goal is to find out how your system might behave when you run out of RAM with 16GB, keep in mind that artificially hampering your system by reducing memory won't be very representative of that as you are drastically reducing the working data set that the OS can keep in memory.

As for the rest of your results, they are exactly as expected: Windows determines that your memory filler app isn't actively using its memory and that memory gets swapped out to make room for other software, just like low activity background software would get swapped out.
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DDR3 has a bandwidth of ~12.8GB/s and a latency of ~80ns while the SSD has a bandwidth of less than 600MB/s and a latency in the 100s of microseconds. Relying heavily on the pagefile will still be agonizingly slow due to the SSD still being ~1000X slower than RAM and will ruin your SSD due to incessant writes.
 
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@InvalidError It's all very nice to throw theoretical bandwidth and latency numbers out there, and obviously it would be slower, but I'm looking for actual benchmarks here. Additionally, SSD's have been proven to actually last a very long time.
 
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quote "It is enough for Windows 10 32-bit. You will need at least 2GB for Windows 10 64-bit though."
Also the experience would be horrible with only 1gb of ram
 
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Time to buy a new motherboard.

Yes, a large pagefile on the SSD might sort of work, but it will still be hugely slow.
It's not 'RAM', but just a pagefile on a drive.

If the OS even starts up with 1GB RAM. The OS needs to be running before it can talk to the pagefile.
Some games as well? No.
 
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So try it.
Write up a tutorial on this, and let us know how it works.
 
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On 32bit windows it seems it will boot with only 1GB, and at that point it can start using the pagefile.

While 16GB is enough for all games, and with Intel's crappy IPC gains (Kaby is around 20% faster per clock then Ivy), I'm pretty sure I'll be keeping my mobo for a while. The only issue here is the growing RAM requirements, and I guess if no one has tried using making ridiculously big pagefiles on an SSD, and have tiny amounts of RAM so that a lot of it gets used, I'll just have to be the first.

I made this thread because I'm surprised no one has ever tried this... I'll buy some cheap 2GB and see how far it goes, then post the results here.
 
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What you want to look up are sustained high queue depth mixed work load benchmarks for an SSD. Running a pagefile is just reads and writes that are queued against the SSD, no different then writing a big file while reading a big file.

The bigger concern is SSD endurance, while DRAM does not come with a defined endurance. I have had pieces of memory run 24/7 for 10 years with no issues. Where as SSD uses Flash or NAND which generally come with a set life span. For instance a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB has a endurance rating of 150TB (82GB/day), depending on where you look, failed endurance means less than 10% of blocks remaining or not enough blocks to safely read or write more data. When a block fails the firmware is smart enough to move files and not destroy data but just shrink your available drive space.

Back to performance, queue depth is your biggest enemy here and looking at high queue depth performance will give you an idea of how RAM, a NAND SSD and a NVME SSD handle that workload.
 
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For the CPU to run efficiently, it needs to have timely access (nanosecond-scale) to random bits of data and for that, DRAM's worst case is more than 1000X faster than the best-case even for the fastest SSDs. Running nearly everything from the swapfile will be orders of magnitude slower than running from RAM. SSDs are no substitute to having an adequate amount of baseline RAM to hold all necessary data. That's assuming software will even manage to load properly without sufficient physical RAM to support it. A few nanoseconds between between low-end memory and high-end can make a 30-50% difference in the more sensitive memory benchmarks. A hundred microseconds from the fastest M.2 SSDs would murder performance.

SSDs may have high endurance, but that endurance will go away quickly if you truly intend to run a workload requiring a 16GB swapfile on a system with only 1GB of RAM. Expect the SSD to be maxed out on read/writes during most non-trivial active use and at that rate, you'll be writing TBs/day.

Try it and find out for yourself. I suspect the main reason you aren't seeing anyone doing this is because the performance is beyond horrible.
 
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Well there's very little point in using a RAM drive in most cases anyway; you can look at various reports, all of which agree that an SATA3 SSD makes no (noticeable) difference to an M.2 in loading games, even if the latter is 2-3x faster, because once you get to SSD speeds the CPU becomes a bottleneck. Which also means that if SATA3 SSDs appears no faster then M.2 SSDs, RAM Drives, even if they are hundreds of times faster just won't make a difference in loading most games/software. (Unless of course you have a RAM drive for another reason?)

Also, just to be clear to anyone else who is thinking about telling me to get new hardware... as I explained a few posts ago, a well OCed 3570k is still plenty good enough for now, and I'm not getting a new mobo, or mobo/CPU just to get more RAM. Intel made the Z-chipsets horrifically expensive, and I only bought this one as it was listed on ebay as for parts. Z68 still goes for over 100£, but I got this one for 35£. The ethernet port only sometimes works, one of the PCIEx16 ports doesn't work, and the memory controller is buggered so only 2 DIMMs work.
 
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Even if you overclocked a 3570k to 10GHz, it will still perform horribly if it needs to wait for the SSD all the time for anything but the most trivial tasks.Having sufficient RAM for the intended workload is one of the cheapest and most critical performance upgrades you can possibly have.
 
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Sounds like he got his parts from the used bargain bin (two dead DIMM slots, intermittent Ethernet, 35 UKP) and doesn't want to spend cash on fitting a reasonable amount of RAM for it.
 
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I think I may have been unclear somewhere; I have 16gb. That is plenty enough for any game. Due to ddr3 limitations, I can only have 8gb per slot. I have 2 working slots, so my maximum of RAM is 16gb. In the future, I may need more then 16 but I can't get more on this motherboard. Therefore I want to see how bad performance is when using an ssd as ram. When I first made this thread I was wondering if anyone knew of any benchmarks, but since I can't find any and no one has posted one,I will run my own, and to do this I will buy 2GB of ram and run it in my system and give it 16gb of pagefile on the ssd. This is obviously not going to give good performance, but I think it would be interesting to try.
 
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Also, when I was talking about my cpu, I was saying that it was good enough for gaming now and for a while in the future, not that overclocking would have any effect on performance when so severely bottlenecked by ram. People were telling me to get a new mobo because it was limited to 16gb of ram
 
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In that case, you shouldn't have any trouble for the foreseeable future unless you go really overboard with stuff that uses massive amounts of RAM. Most software doesn't use more than a few GBs at a time and the OS will swap the less frequently/recently used data out to free RAM, so you may not even notice that the swapfile is being used - at least not until you do something that requires reloading data that got swapped out.
 
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Just in case ? by the time you will need more than 16GB of RAM your whole pc will be slower for that time software/games
 
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As I turns out, there's a way of disabling the RAM at boot rather then having to buy 2GB of RAM and putting it in instead of 8GB... Google has failed me by not finding this.
Anyway, that means I can run the testing tomorrow and I'll post the results here soon.
 
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If your goal is to find out how your system might behave when you run out of RAM with 16GB, keep in mind that artificially hampering your system by reducing memory won't be very representative of that as you are drastically reducing the working data set that the OS can keep in memory.

As for the rest of your results, they are exactly as expected: Windows determines that your memory filler app isn't actively using its memory and that memory gets swapped out to make room for other software, just like low activity background software would get swapped out.
 
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