Lag in Firefox and long delay before entering standby
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I'm using imdisk to create a 4GB dynamic ramdisk (non-awe) on W7x64. I've changed TMP and TEMP for both the user and the system to R:\Temp. I've also set Firefox's cache directory to R:\firefox_cache (changing "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory" in about:config). That all works fine.
But there is a small issue (not big enough to create a ticket for now, I think).
When I open a new tab in Firefox (v83), the browser noticeably lags for half a second. For example the animation on a tab that shows it is loading, is not a smooth animation anymore. Also the tab itself takes longer to appear. And if a tab is opened in the background, the current tab lags as well (noticeable when plaing a video for example). The browser does non of that when the cache directory in on a normal harddisk. (I have my system and programs on an SSD, but the c:\users is a mount point to a normal harddisk).
I also noted another thing. When entering standby (not hibernation; I've completely disabled that), it takes about 20 to 30 seconds now for the computer to finally turn off (and that's with maybe 200MB of data on the ramdisk). Without the ramdisk it only takes a second, maybe two.
Any idea where those lags are coming from and if there's something I can do about them?
For now I see no reason about these lags, except maybe... Do you use NTFS for the ramdisk? And if yes, did you change something in the dynamic ramdisk parameters (Advanced tab)?
In fact, I wonder if TRIM is used. However, even without that, it should not create so frequent lags.
Did you try to use a static ramdisk? We could at least see whether the culprit is RamDyn or something else.
Last edit: v77 2021-01-01
I played around with the settings (individually and combined) and it did change things.
The biggest change (big is relative, when you start from a half a second of lag in the first place ;) ) occurred by changing the filesystem from NTFS to FAT32. That's totally fine with me. I don't think I'll ever need any of NTFS' features on a ramdisk.
The second difference made changing the dynamic allocation block size from 2^20 to something higher (I'm using 2^24 now). If I understand correctly that's size increments the disk's memory use grows at when out of space, right? So the bigger the blocks, the fewer requests to get a new block. Using a static disk had the same effect, but even with 16GB of RAM I don't want to block a few GB of it statically.
Changing the other settings resulted in most likely imaginary differences. I changed the values anyway to something that should mean less activity (increase filesystem block size, lengthen cleanup interval, decrease allowed activity before cleanup). I don't mind a little bit of overhead in memory usage. I have not used the TRIM setting.
The ramdisk is now behaving like the normal disk in Firefox (I set Firefox's cache to the normal hard disk for comparison). I also found that the lag was already there with the normal disk, but because it was a little bit smaller I apparently never bothered me. So part of the lag is completely unrelated to the ramdisk (maybe the network connection or the hardware itself; can't really claim the PC is recent ;) ).
As for the delay before going into energy saving mode (not hibernation): I don't see any disk activity while that is happening, so I doubt something is written to the HD. But are there some timeouts with the ramdisk that make windows wait?
The memory block size: 2^20 means 1MB. 2^24 means 16MB. Given the file fragmentation, you take the risk to have a lot of memory allocated for nothing (and in this case, the speedup should be unnoticeable).
NTFS can be slower than other file systems, but in a normal use, this should be never noticeable.
About the standby, nothing should be triggered by that. Do you use the data synchronization at system shutdown? (3rd tab of the RamDisk Configuration Tool) Even this service is triggered by a shutdown (or more exactly a preshutdown notification), not a standby.
Does this lag also occur with a static ramdisk? This point may be important.
I could not reproduce the shutdown lag after a reboot of the system. I almost never shut down my computer, but rather use standby mode (it could take a month or two before I do a real reboot). The lag appeared right after configuring a ramdisk for the first time. The lag was there no matter the settings of the ramdisk and happened on every switch to standby (no matter if manually or by the power saving settings) on the following. I can't rule out a 100%, that I did something else that same day that caused the lag, but I highly doubt it. After the reboot I tried several different ramdisk settings, but the shutdown lag never came back. I did keep the bigger blocksize settings, less aggressive cleanup options and FAT32 as filesystem, because it just seemed a little bit "zippier" (could very well be that I'm fooling myself at this point).