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

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 2

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

Answer 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

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.