About Free/Defrag RAM

[Kempelen]

There are some programs out there that can free RAM or defrag it when warnings levels are reached. They claim a gain in performance. Do you find that kind of tools useful for XP or Vista? Can they get a "clean" chess programing environment?

[meschle]

Hi - IT is my line of work - in general i cannot recommend ram defraggers/ram releasers - there effect is short lived.

3 things i find helps
1. buy more ram - its not expensive and its the best upgrade you can do

2. Tune your system and therefore free up ram - stop unecessary programs starting up when windows starts and turn off unecessary services.

3. Use game booster - i have come across a few chess enthusiasts that have used this with success http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.html

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

100% snake oil

[Andre van Ark]

Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine used to treat joint pain. However, the most common usage of the phrase is as a derogatory term for compounds offered as medicines which implies that they are fake, fraudulent, quackish, or ineffective. The expression is also applied metaphorically to any product with exaggerated marketing, but questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit

[bob]

There are some programs out there that can free RAM or defrag it when warnings levels are reached. They claim a gain in performance. Do you find that kind of tools useful for XP or Vista? Can they get a "clean" chess programing environment?

(1) what does "defrag" RAM mean? Thanks to the page tables, there is no "fragmentation" possible in RAM.

(2) I'd suspect that the only advantage is that it does make money for the seller.

[F. Bluemers]

There are some programs out there that can free RAM or defrag it when warnings levels are reached. They claim a gain in performance. Do you find that kind of tools useful for XP or Vista? Can they get a "clean" chess programing environment?

(1) what does "defrag" RAM mean? Thanks to the page tables, there is no "fragmentation" possible in RAM.

(2) I'd suspect that the only advantage is that it does make money for the seller.

They "work".(We are talking Windows ofcouse )
Starting up a new process will be faster after defrag.
However "defragging" itself will loose roughly the same amount of time you "win" later.

[bob]

There are some programs out there that can free RAM or defrag it when warnings levels are reached. They claim a gain in performance. Do you find that kind of tools useful for XP or Vista? Can they get a "clean" chess programing environment?

(1) what does "defrag" RAM mean? Thanks to the page tables, there is no "fragmentation" possible in RAM.

(2) I'd suspect that the only advantage is that it does make money for the seller.

They "work".(We are talking Windows ofcouse )
Starting up a new process will be faster after defrag.
However "defragging" itself will loose roughly the same amount of time you "win" later.

How is this possible? Memory is not allocated in sequential blocks, because the virtual memory hardware makes this unnecessary and pointless. Note he was not talking about defragging the _disk_, but defragging "RAM" which is main memory...

[F. Bluemers]

Yes,We are talking memory and windows.
What happens is that when processes returns memory Windows is lazy and does not immediatly free it.If this happens a lot and one starts a process that uses a lot of memory,Windows first has to add all the unused memory chunks back to the free list.
What a socalled "defragger" does is requesting a large memory chunk to enforce windows to keep the "free list" updated.

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

Sounds a bit like calling "sync" in Linux to ensure dirty pages are written to disk.

That has nothing to do with defragmentation. And it will happen automatically anyway, or you would have massive data loss at the first power failure.

So basically I don't believe a word of it And I can't say I have ever observed it either.

You can probably find a detailed enough description of the VM subsystem to prove or disprove this assertion.

[F. Bluemers]

Sounds a bit like calling "sync" in Linux to ensure dirty pages are written to disk.

That has nothing to do with defragmentation. And it will happen automatically anyway, or you would have massive data loss at the first power failure.

So basically I don't believe a word of it And I can't say I have ever observed it either.

You can probably find a detailed enough description of the VM subsystem to prove or disprove this assertion.

is this ok?:
http://books.google.nl/books?id=MzU3ms3 ... +page+list
In case my posts were not clear enough:using memory defraggers don't make sense as they cost as much time as they win back later.