Any advantages to using RAM Drive for temp?

General Discussions
1

I’ve read mostly older posts and just wanted to get a more current answer.

I have a pretty decent dedicated plex server.

Are there any advantages in performance in using ram as a ram disk for my temp directory for transcoding?

Windows 10 pro, 64 bit, 32 gb dd3 2400 ram.

Everything works great now, no noticeable performance problems… But if I can tweak things to run better… Why not?

Just curious. Opinions?

2

Whatever RAM you dedicate to a RAM drive will be taken away from system RAM, which may degrade performance. You may be trading off one bottleneck for another. But, I suppose, the only way to find out is to try it.

3

With that much RAM in the machine, Windows will automatically dedicate a significant amount of it for drive caching anyway.
There is no point in creating a dedicated RAM drive, IMHO.

4

Small SSD drives are pretty cheap these days and make great drives to use for the transcoding directory.

5

fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.com/2012/05/ramdisk-vs-ssd-on-ubuntu.html

older article on performance…

I have a SSD drive sitting somewhere I could use as a transcoding directory. Is there a decent way to run some transcoding benchmarks via command line with plex?

I’d be glad to try it both ways and post results.

6

I have a 20GB RAM disk that I use for the cache. The default directory for the cache was normally on 15,000 RPM hard drives - which are already fast… but the one improvement I believe I noticed was the filling in of the artwork when I scroll through the listings. It could be all in my head - but I rarely see the temporary image before the artwork loads now.

My cache is currently using about 12GB of that space.

7

What are you using to create your RAM Drive? Someone suggested ImDisk so I’m giving that a try.

8

I’m using Ubuntu - so it’s just a Ramdisk mount… I don’t believe I installed anything special - just had to change my config. I looked on SourceForge for ImDisk - and it appears to be what you want - and seems to have been updated recently.

My server has 32GB of RAM, but I’ve allocated 20GB of that to the RAMDISK. Ubuntu has a low memory overheard, so it was otherwise wasted memory.

9

It’s up and running… seems to be working fine. I’d be interested in running some benchmarks.

Are there any logging tools that I could use to tell what kind of performance I’m getting?

10

If you can’t tell by using the system itself, it seems like a wasted effort, except for the learning part.