Originally posted by: Nothinman
No, putting the pagefile on a ramdisk never makes sense. The whole point of the pagefile is to give the system a place to store data when there's high memory pressure and by creating a ramdisk you're removing a chunk of memory from the system and thus making memory pressure that much more likely.
For general usage, I agree completely. Some games, the ones that don't load levels or maps, write data on a continual basis to the pagefile. That's the reason they don't need to have levels/maps. A few examples of this are any Microsoft flight simulator, X-Plane, and and Oblivion. Now, it isn't possible to move fast enough in Oblivion to get any performance benefit, but in M$'s FSX, I used to get a slight pause as the textures loaded, when flying low and fast. The lower or faster I flew, the more frequent the pauses. With a RAM disk, that no longer happens, even while flying lower and faster than before. Admittedly, that benefit doesn't apply to very many people, but it does exist.
Photoshop is a special case though because that whole scratch disk thing is crap. It was added back when Photoshop's main platform was Mac pre-OS X where there was virtually no memory management so they did it all on their own. I really wish they'd just remove that and let the OS do it's thing like everyone else.
This I disagree with completely. Having Photoshop be able to have it's own scratch disk is a huge performance benefit, even today. It allows being able to use a disk (whether a physical drive or RAM drive) that's completely separate from the Windows pagefile. Just adding a third disk with the first partion used as the Photoshop scratch disk makes for a noticeable increase in speed, assuming you're working with large pics in RAW format.
If both Windows & Photoshop were having to fight over/share the pagefile, it would bring things to a crawl, especially for the vast majority of people, who still have only 2GB of system RAM. When you add the fact that Photoshop makes changing from using the Windows pagefile to any other drive as simple as selecting the drive from a drop-down box and the average Photoshop user knows shitloads about cameras, but nothing about computers or OS's, it won't be changed anytime soon, and most likely ever.