How to disable memory caching?

[Haswellx86]

Is there any way to disable memory caching in Windows? No, disabling prefetch, SysMain, and disk caching is not it. Even after that, Windows caches stuff in the memory, which can me seen in the task manager or resource manager. And yes, I know I can clear the standby memory (cache), but I want to completely disable it. I know it will hurt performance, but on a fast SSD, it wouldn't much difference, and anyways I just want to try it first.

[PDifolco]

2 minutes ago, NvidiaFirePro6900XXTX3DPRO said:

Is there any way to disable memory caching in Windows? No, disabling prefetch, SysMain, and disk caching is not it. Even after that, Windows caches stuff in the memory, which can me seen in the task manager or resource manager. And yes, I know I can clear the standby memory (cache), but I want to completely disable it. I know it will hurt performance, but on a fast SSD, it wouldn't much difference, and anyways I just want to try it first.

It only makes sense in the name of science because it has zero advantage irl...

Even with fast 5GB/sec SSD, RAM is still much faster like tenfold...

[Needfuldoer]

Why on earth would you want to do that? Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

[Zando_]

I would highly doubt it. Operating systems are usually designed to load their most needed files into RAM. Heck some are made to load the entire OS into RAM so they can boot off read-only media. 

1 minute ago, NvidiaFirePro6900XXTX3DPRO said:

I know it will hurt performance, but on a fast SSD, it wouldn't much difference

Nah. The fastest SSDs measure random reads/writes in 100s of megabytes per second. Shitass slow RAM is tens of gigabytes per second, with latencies measured in nanoseconds. The better Optane drives might have more of a chance vs RAM, but would likely still be a good chunk slower. 

Just now, PDifolco said:

Even with fast 5GB/sec SSD, RAM is still much faster like tenfold...

Keep in mind that those peak reads/writes are only for large files, the OS uses a bunch of teeny files, so it's even worse than you'd think for SSDs. 

[YoungBlade]

RAM caching is such an old concept in operating systems that it is likely built right into the fabric of every modern OS. Maybe on Linux you could hack your way into disabling it - probably by compiling a version of the OS from scratch that acted that way, as I doubt there's a config for that option - but I doubt you can do that with Windows.

 

Even if you could disable it in Linux or another OS, I wouldn't be surprised if the results were horrific. If not causing outright kernel panic/BSOD situations, it would completely cripple performance for absolutely no benefit.

 

You know how a computer slows to a crawl when it runs out of RAM? This is partly because it can't cache things anymore. So the computer would be in a state where it behaved as it it were always out of RAM.

 

Basically, this is a not-so-good idea.

 

EDIT: Here's an old post on AskUbuntu - the "solution" given is to write a script that forcibly clears the cache all the time to give you effectively the same result, if you're really masochistic and want to see what it's like to use an OS with effectively no RAM caching: https://askubuntu.com/questions/155768/how-do-i-clean-or-disable-the-memory-cache