Is it sensible to use a ramdisk on a build server?

Question

At my company we are currently researching various strategies for speeding up our CI builds. We have profiled our builds and determined that we are constrained by an I/O bottleneck. We have quite a few options to deal with that in the near future (~1-2 months) but would really like to see an improvement now.

I proposed using a ramdisk as the checkout and buildfile location. The build outputs and logs would of course be stored on physical disk.

Is that a sensible thing to do or are there significant drawbacks to this approach? I am not looking for answers that regard the hardware side of things but rather than if the interaction between common build systems (e.g. MSBuild) and a ramdisk will cause any issues and if there are other risks I need to be aware of.

Answer 1

As long as you have enough memory, it's a very sensible thing to do.

The only real drawback is ,naturally, your build gets lost on shutdown/powerfailure which usually isn't a big convern for the CI builds.