Can I use a RAM disk to speed up my IDE?

Question

Duplicate:

RAMDrive for compiling - is there such a thing?

I have an idea how to speed up my IDE.

I want to create a RAM disk and move my solution onto this virtual disk.
I think that this can speed up the IDE because RAM is much faster than a HDD.

Has anyone done this before?

PS: I think, when I have some documents in my program(real world) which are used frequently(for example some document templates) it could be good idea to move these documents onto a RAM disk as well to speed up I/O. Am I wrong?

If power is a problem, a UPS could solve it.

Answer 1

I have a 128GB Samsung flash based hard drive and it is FAST. My whole system, VM and IDE included, load in less than one minute.

Answer 2

I do remember reading about doing this with netbeans a while ago. This article has quite a good guide on doing it in linux.

NetBeans on speed

Currently can't find an article on how to do it in windows, however I know it's possible.

Answer 3

Personally I'd just buy a SSD disk, you could lose your whole soln at any time if your ram loses power.

Right now I have 4gb of ram and a 150gb 10k rpm velociraptor hard drive for my boot disk, running win xp pro 64bit and everything(VS 2008, sql management studio, and my testing VM's) is very fast.

Answer 4

Honestly, if you have Vista/Windows Server 2008 x64 and you jam your workstation with 4 to 8 GB of RAM, for most tasks, everything will be in cache or stored by SuperFetch, which will be a lot easier to manage and just about as high performance as a RAM disk. The RAM disk won't do a thing for you if you're starving your other system RAM to make it work.

BTW, I tried your suggestion a couple of years ago. While it technically worked, copying the necessary data to the RAM disk on every boot took too long and was a pain.

Answer 5

Given sufficient RAM, this problem's been solved for a long time. If you have lots of RAM, stuff from the HD gets cached in it anyhow, and the HD is only the bottleneck the first time you're loading something at boot. As far as the initial boot time, I'd suggest using sleep/suspend mode and simply not rebooting your computer frequently.

Answer 6

I just read a post on this very subject: http://nesteruk.org/blog/post/Cheap-way-of-speeding-up-Visual-Studio-IO.aspx

Answer 7

I have this one with 8GB attached, and it's so sweet ;) Dual SATA RAID0, it knocks the socks off SSD's.

Answer 8

This might not buy you much. If you use up memory with your RAM disk, you just going to deprive the OS RAM for virtual memory, and that is going to be causing more frequent page faults and thus potential more writing to the hard disk.

You could loose your whole soln at any time if your ram looses power.

Element is absolutely right. Your machine could lock up at at any time for whatever reason. If you do decide to use RAM disk at least have a batch file on your desktop that copies everything to disk, and run it frequently.

Answer 9

I posted an answer to a similar question previously. As a summary: yes it's possible, I used to do it with my browser (there is a link on how to get it running under linux).

As other people have mentioned if you have a tonne of RAM that stuff will be cached for you anyway, but imo having a ram drive is a bit more explicit than just letting the OS try to deal with it.

If you know that you want 200mb of code in memory all the time then you know you can put in a ram drive and acheive that.

I do wonder however if the OS will cache it twice (once on the ram drive, once itself) if it doesn't know it's on a RAM drive...

Answer 10

Under Linux /dev/shm is a ramdisk so you might have some quick success using that as your compile destination (easier than rsyncing your source etc, also has the benefit, if you have one, of reducing any wear on an SSD in your machine).