Recently, I had to set up a few virtual machines for use with one of the other articles that I was working on. Although I got the job done, one of the virtual machines’ performance could be best described as painfully slow. Of course, I can’t say that I was surprised. The VMs were running on aging lab hardware, which was a little bit slow to begin with. When you throw in the fact that this particular VM was running a really I/O intensive workload, it quickly becomes apparent why the VM performed so slowly.
A boost for temporary VMs
But what if there was an easy way to make the VM perform far better, on the same hardware? Believe it or not, it is possible to give a poorly performing VM really good performance without upgrading the hardware. Like all miracle solutions, however, there are a few caveats. The biggest caveat, in this case, is that the technique that I am about to show you is ideally suited to lab VMs, but this probably isn’t the sort of thing that you would want to do in production.
The basic concept behind this technique has been around for decades, and yet it is something that I almost never hear anyone mention. In fact, I had forgotten all about it myself until YouTube recommended a video demonstrating a playthrough of a 1980s video game.
Back in the 1980s, I had a friend who was really into PC gaming. Because his PC did not have a hard drive, he had to run games off of floppy disks, which was the dominant type of removable media at the time. To make a long story short, floppy drives weren’t exactly known for being fast, and there was one particular game (the same game shown in the YouTube video), that was borderline unplayable because my friend’s PC’s disk performance was so slow. Collectively, my friend and I solved the problem by setting up a RAM disk.
A RAM disk works by using a portion of a computer’s physical memory for storage. The operating system treats the RAM disk as if it were another hard disk attached to the computer.
In a way, this is the exact opposite of the way that Windows normally works. Years ago, memory was really expensive, so Microsoft implemented a virtual memory feature so that Windows could use physical storage to make up for shortages in RAM. Even today, Windows 10 still uses virtual memory, as shown below. Rather than using physical storage to make up for shortages in RAM, however, a RAM disk uses system RAM as an alternative to using physical storage.
RAM disk: Advantages and disadvantages
The advantage of using a RAM disk, of course, is that RAM is much faster than physical storage, especially HDD storage.
There are two main disadvantages to using a RAM disk. First, RAM disk storage is non-persistent. As soon as you turn off the computer, the RAM disk (and everything stored on it) goes away.
The other big disadvantage is that RAM disks consume some of your physical memory. In the case of a Hyper-V host, that means that memory that could ordinarily be to host additional virtual machines. Oh, and there is one more thing… I am honestly not sure what would happen if you tried to live-migrate a VM that was running on a RAM disk. I suspect that the live migration would probably work, so long as the RAM disk used a drive letter that was the same as the drive letter being used for VM storage on the destination host.
Creating a RAM disk is really easy to do. There are a number of free utilities that you can download that will allow you to create a RAM disk with minimal effort. For the purposes of this article, I am using a free tool called ImDisk. As you can see in the figure below, this utility simply requires you to specify the size of the RAM disk that you want to create, and then choose a file system and a drive letter, and click OK. The process couldn’t be easier.
So how much of a performance gain can a RAM disk really give you? Well, for the purposes of this article, I decided to do a simple, albeit unscientific test. I created a Hyper-V virtual machine, started a stopwatch, and then watched how long it took to install Windows 10. I stopped the clock as soon as the VM displayed the Windows desktop. As you can see in the figure below, it took 27:07 to reach this point.
With my baseline test complete, I deleted the VM and then created an identical virtual machine, using a RAM disk instead of hard disk storage. Once again, I used a stopwatch to time how long it took to install Windows 10. This time, the installation only took eight minutes and 16 seconds to complete. In other words, I reduced the installation time by almost 19 minutes!
As I installed Windows onto a RAM disk, it occurred to me that the performance still wasn’t as good as it could be because Windows was being installed from an ISO file, which resided on a hard disk. That being the case, I created a second RAM disk and copied my Windows 10 ISO file to it. Next, I reformatted my original RAM disk and attempted the installation again. The figure below shows an install time of six minutes and eight seconds. In reality, the install time was several seconds less, because I had a bit of trouble getting the timer to stop, but let’s assume that 6:08 is accurate. That means that I reduced the install time by another two minutes and that overall I reduced the amount of time required to install Windows from about 27 minutes to about six minutes!
No money spent
I will concede that there are other, arguably more practical ways of improving virtual machine performance. The thing that is noteworthy about this particular solution, however, is that I achieved a very significant performance gain without spending any money. As I stated earlier, the temporary nature of RAM drives means that this solution is probably best suited for use with temporary virtual machines, such as those used in lab environments. Even so, the performance gains are undeniable.
Photo credit: Pixabay
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