ME boot floppy just expands compressed files from floppy to ramdrive. It is for space constraints.
Large memory floppy only machines may use it. Maybe compiling programs. But in reality in a ordinary work and ordinary 386/486 with ordinary hard drive, you do not really need it.

Back when I used a 486 or Pentium every day, I made a small RAM drive to hold my browser cache. I had autoexec.bat make the cache folder during boot up. It was much faster than a hard drive, and I didn't care if it got erased at power down.

demiurge wrote on 2024-05-12, 20:40:

Does COMMAND.COM ever get called after boot that might get an improved speed being referenced from the ramdisk?

Yes, it often happens that COMMAND.COM gets reloaded, eg. Norton Commander reloads it whenever running a program.
Copying COMMAND.COM to the RAMdrive, and doing eg.:

SET COMSPEC=D:\COMMAND.COM

may indeed speed things up a little.
But I've never found it worth bothering...

Does OS/2 have a pagefile that could use a ramdrive to improve speed? I'm thinking about playing with OS/2.

If you have so much memory that you will never need swap, you can try changing:

MEMMAN=SWAP

to:

MEMMAN=NOSWAP

fosterwj03 wrote on 2024-05-12, 22:24:

Back when I used a 486 or Pentium every day, I made a small RAM drive to hold my browser cache. I had autoexec.bat make the cache folder during boot up. It was much faster than a hard drive, and I didn't care if it got erased at power down.

Noice ... a fast incognito mode for fast porn viewing pleasure. 😂

Back in the 80386/80486 days my home computer had only 4MB of RAM (the RAM modules pretty expensive back then), so other than a one-time test, I've never used DOS RAM-drives. Later hard drives got bigger and fast enough (and win 95 came) that I forgot that there was such a DOS tool.

Nowadays old FP or EDO RAM sticks are (relatively) cheap, so RAM-drive is good option for fast "temp drive" on retro DOS computer - for example 386SX machine maxed-out with 16 MB of RAM. I think FreeDOS uses RAM-drive by default.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-05-13, 05:14:

Back in the 80386/80486 days my home computer had only 4MB of RAM (the RAM modules pretty expensive back then), so other than a one-time test, I've never used DOS RAM-drives. Later hard drives got bigger and fast enough (and win 95 came) that I forgot that there was such a DOS tool.

Nowadays old FP or EDO RAM sticks are (relatively) cheap, so RAM-drive is good option for fast "temp drive" on retro DOS computer - for example 386SX machine maxed-out with 16 MB of RAM. I think FreeDOS uses RAM-drive by default.

Yo are right in that point, that all my 486 and P5 computers get unnaturrally high ammount of RAM. 486 at 64MB. Nobody had that ammount of ram in their home 486. And only few P5 motherboards stay at 64MB and only because Cacheing in some motherboard is limited to that.