I'm sorry - my experience with programming on Windows is very limited. A cursory look at CreateProcess seems to hint that the program needs to reside on the filesystem.
Regarding the performance difference, I would expect that if you're starting the same program repeatedly, any advantage you would gain from loading the program image from RAM would be made up, since the program and its libraries would all likely be in the OS' filesystem cache after the first run. But, I haven't measured this, so I can't say for sure!
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I'm sorry - my experience with programming on Windows is very limited. A cursory look at CreateProcess seems to hint that the program needs to reside on the filesystem.
Regarding the performance difference, I would expect that if you're starting the same program repeatedly, any advantage you would gain from loading the program image from RAM would be made up, since the program and its libraries would all likely be in the OS' filesystem cache after the first run. But, I haven't measured this, so I can't say for sure!