Has anyone seen a performance increase in Visual Studio 2008 by using ReadyBoost in Windows Vista? I have 4G of RAM and adding more will do nothing (I'm running Vista 32), so I'm investigating other options to speed up the responsiveness of the development environment and the build process.
Upgrading to 64-bit Windows is not possible.
In my experience, ReadyBoost does provide marginal performance improvements, but typically for loading larger applications that you use often.
If "loading Visual Studio" is an improvement for you, you will like ReadyBoost. In my opinion, you should get an inexpensive drive, and just use ReadyBoost anyway.
To really improve the performance of Visual Studio with your system, ReadyBoost will only do a little... better hardware will do much more.
Readyboost only has a real impact if you're running tight on memory - it's merely a faster repository for some of virtual memory. Check out Task Manager - if your machine is running really tight, then ReadyBoost might help. But if you have plenty of free memory, it'll do next to nothing.
I have seen a great improvement with my VS2008 environemt after adding an SD card and assigning for use with ReadyBoost under windows 7 32bit. I disagree with some of the comments given about memory especially in 32bit environments. The idea with ReadyBoost is to cache small files that will typically transfer from the hard drive much slower due to the poor access times on these devices. If its a big file your reading then the hard drive is still the best source due to the fast sequencial read speed, but for smaller files then the ready boost cache can give up to 10x improvement over HDD access.
Its worth trying it yourself, its just a case of adding either an SD or USB pen drive to your system and when asked allocate up to 4gb of memory for the readyboost cache. If it does not work for you just remove the drive. I found it worthwhile checking the class of the SD card in my case. I have a class 6 SDHC and found this worked best after running various sd cards throught CrystalDsikMark. Here are the results from a 7200rpm HDD versus a Class 6 SD card (remember its random access we are looking for here!!!)
7200rpm 250Gb SATA 2.5" Hard Disk
Sequential Read : 42.671 MB/s
Sequential Write : 41.693 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 26.032 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 29.445 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.493 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.896 MB/s
4GB Class 6 SD Card
Sequential Read : 15.085 MB/s
Sequential Write : 9.376 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 14.954 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 2.146 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 4.373 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.025 MB/s
I am just about to get a expresscard SSD which uses PCI and should be even faster, will update here as I get the results from that. Hope this helps