"Download more RAM" but actually for real.

[JovanD]

Okay lets say you have a workload that requires lots of RAM and you don't have enough... and you also don't have a fast SSD or some monster raid array

But you happen to have an older surplus server machine from ebay or your sibling/wife's PC has decent amount of RAM and they don't use it much.

What you do is use "ram disk software" to create a virtual drive on RAM on the server/donor PC and than you share that drive on the network.

Next on your PC you create a "symbolic link" to the ram drive on the network and move your "paging file" there. 

TADA! You literally downloaded more RAM!

Spoiler

Yes i know it's a dumb idea because any "fault" in the page file means instant BSOD, like ethernet cable getting loose or some network packet loss, boom you got your self BSOD and im not entirely sure if Windows would let you do it, although there's always a way to force stuff with manually editing registry keys.
But still it's a fun idea for the sheer novelty factor for downloading RAM.

 

[Vandorlot]

What differentiates RAM from other forms of memory is the speed. Ram wouldn't be nearly as fast if it was bottlenecked by the network.

[ColeIsDaBest]

Latency would be so bad, you might as well use a USB.

[RadiatingLight]

1 minute ago, NZgamer said:

Isn'th this something along the lines of what ReadyBoost tries to do?

Yeah for old windows vista PCs that don't have an SSD. Obsolete nowadays and never really worked in my experience.

[ColeIsDaBest]

1 minute ago, NZgamer said:

Isn'th this something along the lines of what ReadyBoost tries to do?

Keyword there is tries. It is such a hassle and has little to no benefit, but yes that is the idea.

[JovanD]

2 minutes ago, Vandorlot said:

What differentiates RAM from other forms of memory is the speed. Ram wouldn't be nearly as fast if it was bottlenecked by the network.

Yea of course, i would love to see some one test this and compare performance to page file being on mechanical HDD.

I herd there was a kind of "SLI for network adapters" software, so with couple of network cards with multiple adapters i bet you could do at least DDR1 transfer speeds, but latency, oh boy who knows, probably vary bad.

[ColeIsDaBest]

2 minutes ago, NZgamer said:

 

It still has Windows 10 support, I tried to use it on an older system and in my experience it actually got a bit snappier, not by much though.

If you use a high quality USB3 drive with good random io performance I guess it could work. But at that point you might as well find a used machine locally for cheaper.

[LogicalDrm]

I don't think you understand how pagefile works. Its not there to act as RAM when actual RAM runs out. Its there to store things that are accessed more frequently than storage, but not as frequently than RAM. No matter how much you have pagefile, it still doesn't cover up for RAM. I'm saying this from experience. We had old PC years ago with 1.5gb of RAM in time where 2gb was minimum. Had 20gb pagefile. Thats more than I have now set. It didn't help. Not that much, as the effect was same from 10gb to 15gb to 20gb.

 

Software needs to be coded to utilize pagefile.