Nvme page file. Curious

[Shadow_Storm56]

If you had an Nvme drive so extremely fast drive and had a huge ram load for some sorta work load and set the page file to an Nvme drive would it be like having more ram since Nvme is like. .. half as fast as ram.

[ARikozuM]

I wouldn't recommend a page file on an NVMe drive unless it's small. You're not going to gain much from placing a pagefile on the NVMe vs a SATA SSD.

[Shadow_Storm56]

I don't need to its just a curious thing 

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Shadow_Storm56 said:

I don't need to its just a curious thing 

It'll be much faster, but the issue is the heat that NVMe can (note "can") increase due to writing to the page file.

[done12many2]

1 hour ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

If you had an Nvme drive so extremely fast drive and had a huge ram load for some sorta work load and set the page file to an Nvme drive would it be like having more ram since Nvme is like. .. half as fast as ram.

 

NVMe is still substantially slower than RAM.  It's not just the sustained read/write speeds that are slower, but latency.  You're better off increasing RAM if you're noticing a lot of paging.

[Shadow_Storm56]

3 minutes ago, done12many2 said:

 

NVMe is still substantially slower than RAM.  It's not just the sustained read/write speeds that are slower, but latency.  You're better off increasing RAM if you're noticing a lot of paging.

This is completely a hypthetical question, i do not have any issues with ram at the moment 

[done12many2]

1 minute ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

This is completely a hypthetical question, i do not have any issues with ram at the moment 

1 hour ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

would it be like having more ram since Nvme is like. .. half as fast as ram

 

To answer your question, it would not be like having more RAM.  It would be slightly better than a paging file on a standard SSD.

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

This is completely a hypthetical question, i do not have any issues with ram at the moment 

The issue isn't the speed or latency. It's the level of use of the hardware. Your CPU talks to everything on your motherboard, but talks to controllers that will get data off of drives, onto said drives, and usually these aren't as fast as can be.

 

RAM, on the other hand, is tightly connected to the CPU. Talking to the RAM is fast enough that responses today are nearing 4ns in response versus milliseconds with SSD and HDD's.

 

Second issue is heat and energy consumed. RAM is much faster and produces little to no heat (which is why RAM comes with no heatsink). An SSD can still consume a good amount of wattage ranging from 500mW to 4W on older models while RAM uses less than 3W when in use.

 

Having said this, I wouldn't use the NVMe as a page file. PCIe gives the SSD quite a bit of power and with it (thanks to inefficiencies) heat to dissipate. My 950 PRO never had the overheating issue, but it has occurred to others. Samsung fixed this by adding a copper strip to their new M.2 NVMe's. The other issue with the paging file is how TRIM works to ensure health of the SSD. TRIM requires that blocks be cleaned in chunks and if the page file occupies a portion of the block, it will not be able to delete the data or maintain proper parallelization.

[Shadow_Storm56]

2 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

The issue isn't the speed or latency. It's the level of use of the hardware. Your CPU talks to everything on your motherboard, but talks to controllers that will get data off of drives, onto said drives, and usually these aren't as fast as can be.

 

RAM, on the other hand, is tightly connected to the CPU. Talking to the RAM is fast enough that responses today are nearing 4ns in response versus milliseconds with SSD and HDD's.

 

Second issue is heat and energy consumed. RAM is much faster and produces little to no heat (which is why RAM comes with no heatsink). An SSD can still consume a good amount of wattage ranging from 500mW to 4W on older models while RAM uses less than 3W when in use.

 

Having said this, I wouldn't use the NVMe as a page file. PCIe gives the SSD quite a bit of power and with it (thanks to inefficiencies) heat to dissipate. My 950 PRO never had the overheating issue, but it has occurred to others. Samsung fixed this by adding a copper strip to their new M.2 NVMe's. The other issue with the paging file is how TRIM works to ensure health of the SSD. TRIM requires that blocks be cleaned in chunks and if the page file occupies a portion of the block, it will not be able to delete the data or maintain proper parallelization.

Good answer. to be honest.... besides in low end setups.... is page file really ever used anymore ?

[ARikozuM]

Just now, Shadow_Storm56 said:

Good answer. to be honest.... besides in low end setups.... is page file really ever used anymore ?

It has to be for certain parts of the system to work well. You can disable it with little to no issues, but some things that aren't placed in RAM for reasons (like being accessed once and not used again) are sent to the paging file to be called later.

 

 

[done12many2]

1 minute ago, ARikozuM said:

The issue isn't the speed or latency. It's the level of use of the hardware. Your CPU talks to everything on your motherboard, but talks to controllers that will get data off of drives, onto said drives, and usually these aren't as fast as can be.

 

Otherwise referred to as latency.  

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, done12many2 said:

 

Otherwise referred to as latency.  

Latency when talking of RAM is commonly referring to first, second, etc. words/calls. In this case, I'm speaking of the time it takes for the individual components to send signals down the hill.

 

But, yes. If you speak broadly.

[done12many2]

10 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Latency when talking of RAM is commonly referring to first, second, etc. words/calls. In this case, I'm speaking of the time it takes for the individual components to send signals down the hill.

 

But, yes. If you speak broadly.

 

Sorry, I thought the OP asked if a paging file on a NVMe would be similar in performance to RAM itself.  

[Shadow_Storm56]

10 minutes ago, done12many2 said:

 

Sorry, I thought the OP asked if a paging file on a NVMe would be similar in performance to RAM itself.  

Sorta what I meant yes..... seeing as how nvme is very fast I thought maybe if you really needed a ton of ram for some insain reason that nvme page file would give you not simular to ram performance but maybe close enough to seem just like really bad ram rather than how slow page file is normally.

[done12many2]

1 hour ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

Sorta what I meant yes..... seeing as how nvme is very fast I thought maybe if you really needed a ton of ram for some insain reason that nvme page file would give you not simular to ram performance but maybe close enough to seem just like really bad ram rather than how slow page file is normally.

 

Yeah, that's what I thought you were asking.  Unfortunately, it wouldn't even feel like "really bad ram."

 

Even though NVMe drives don't have a slow controller to pass through (they communicate directly with the CPU via the PCIe/NVMe protocol), they still have limitations in bandwidth (PCIe pipeline), speed and latency.  NVMe drives simply read/write slower than RAM.  Additionally, unlike RAM, which is also directly linked to the CPU and close in proximity, NVMe drives are located further from the CPU increasing latency.

 

You don't have to go much further than read/write speeds in order to see how much slower NVMe would be.  Keep in mind that the memory benchmarks below are for my Quad channel, but you can still expect more that half of that out of most current dual channel platforms.

 

The read speeds of my RAM are over 1600% faster than the read speed of my Samsung 950 Pro NVMe.  The write speeds are 2200% faster.  

 

Like I said, latency would be an even bigger issue.  Response on my RAM in the benchmark was 51.4 ns.  The 950 Pro would be .01 ms (roughly 10,000 ns) plus the extra travel time. That's a little bit of a difference especially when you are tying to ensure that you aren't wasting CPU cycles.  

 

 

 

 

[Shadow_Storm56]

1 hour ago, done12many2 said:

 

Yeah, that's what I thought you were asking.  Unfortunately, it wouldn't even feel like "really bad ram."

 

Even though NVMe drives don't have a slow controller to pass through (they communicate directly with the CPU via the PCIe/NVMe protocol), they still have limitations in bandwidth (PCIe pipeline), speed and latency.  NVMe drives simply read/write slower than RAM.  Additionally, unlike RAM, which is also directly linked to the CPU and close in proximity, NVMe drives are located further from the CPU increasing latency.

 

You don't have to go much further than read/write speeds in order to see how much slower NVMe would be.  Keep in mind that the memory benchmarks below are for my Quad channel, but you can still expect more that half of that out of most current dual channel platforms.

 

The read speeds of my RAM are over 1600% faster than the read speed of my Samsung 950 Pro NVMe.  The write speeds are 2200% faster.  

 

Like I said, latency would be an even bigger issue.  Response on my RAM in the benchmark was 51.4 ns.  The 950 Pro would be .01 ms (roughly 10,000 ns) plus the extra travel time. That's a little bit of a difference especially when you are tying to ensure that you aren't wasting CPU cycles.  

 

 

 

 

Holy crap what voltage are you running to get 4.9ghz outta that cpu......

[done12many2]

6 hours ago, Shadow_Storm56 said:

Holy crap what voltage are you running to get 4.9ghz outta that cpu......

 

It's a per core overclock.  It only runs 4.9 GHz when 4 or less cores have a load. 4.8 GHz with 6 or less, 4.7 with 7 or less and 4.6 with all 8 cores under load.

[Shadow_Storm56]

3 hours ago, done12many2 said:

 

It's a per core overclock.  It only runs 4.9 GHz when 4 or less cores have a load. 4.8 GHz with 6 or less, 4.7 with 7 or less and 4.6 with all 8 cores under load.

I honestly don't know how to do that 

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I've been wondering about this myself - putting a pagefile on an NVMe / PCI-E SSD in my desktop.  I'm more frequently running out of RAM, especially when I load Chrome up.  (Some sites are quite high on memory usage, like youtube, twitch, newegg, amazon & others - I've seen individual tabs exceed 1 GB and approach 2 GB, & also some are high on CPU usage.)

I already have the max memory installed (32GB) that's supported by my motherboard & CPU (ASRock Z97 Extreme6, i7-4790K).  I don't want to replace my motherboard for another 5-8 years, unless AMD or Intel steps up their game and comes out with a CPU that's overall 6-15x or more faster (with at least 2-3x of the improvement being in single-threaded IPC) at the same price, sooner than the current 5-10% per generation trend, or if it dies, forcing replacement.  (Also I'd like for PCI-E 5, DDR5, etc to be out when I upgrade, as I like to make my existing setup last, get the most use out of my investment, & don't mind skipping generations.)

 

Having a pagefile on a mechanical drive is, to put it kindly, Scheiße, and apparently having it on a SATA based SSD isn't all that great either.   (At least that's what windows says it's set for, putting it on the C: which is the SSD.)  Also the other day I got a memory management BSOD, but was down to a few hundred MB space free on the SSD & pretty much out of RAM.  (I've since freed up about 44 GB.)

What if I got something like a 256GB Plextor M8Pe PCI-E SSD, or a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 SSD?  Or is there a better solution that doesn't involve getting a new motherboard & will still allow me to use > 128-256 GB of virtual memory?  (I probably won't be doing this for at least a few months, as I've spent all I want to spend this holiday season, or close to it, though.)