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I recently found several articles that one could boost IDE (say eclipse) performance by placing JDK on a ramdisk and letting it use it for build purposes. I could guess how that could make things faster but I was not aware of exact details.

Won't the IDEs load needed parts of JDK into memory anyway? Is it a one-time benefit to keep JDK on a ramdisk or is it a continuous thing. It'd be great if someone could shed some light on the exact mechanism.

The motivation is that the project I'm working on is huge and sometimes I do need to turn on 'build automatically' feature in eclipse. I'm exploring ways to speed up the build process

NOTE

I posted a different question with the term 'JVM' in place of 'JDK' which made it confusing and misleading. I apologize for that and I restructured my question.

phanin
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    Does it actually help? I kind of doubt this helps a lot because your operating system should be smart enough to keep often needed file resources in RAM automatically. At least linux does that: http://www.linuxatemyram.com/ – zapl Sep 04 '15 at 19:46
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    I don't buy it either. Besides, how slow is your Eclipse anyway? :) Got get a coffee when it's loading:) – ZhongYu Sep 04 '15 at 19:50
  • Do you have IDE performance issues? Does it need boosting? --- I mean, if you're working, it should be running all day, so startup time is irrelevant. Similar for homework. – Andreas Sep 04 '15 at 19:50

3 Answers3

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Eclipse 'build automatically' (and Project/Build also) doesn't use the JDK compiler at all, see What is the difference between javac and the Eclipse compiler? . That link indicates the same is true of IntelliJ, but I don't have firsthand knowledge there.

If you are also doing javac builds, for example from maven, ant or such, read speed of JDK tools and JRE/JVM (which it runs on) could matter to those.

Eclipse needs to keep in memory not only the source but the compiled version and symbols for everything; for your huge project I would first check that eclipse itself gets enough RAM and isn't being swapped (by the OS).

Community
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dave_thompson_085
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Just get SSD (it will be sufficient to run IDE at acceptable speed)

As for JVM - yes, it's one time benefit (depends on your RAM amount though)

Anton Malyshev
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  • Thanks Anton. I already use SSD. However, the project that I'm working on is huge and sometimes I do need to turn on 'build automatically' feature in my eclipse. I'm exploring ways to speed up the build process irrespective of codebase refactoring. – phanin Sep 04 '15 at 22:55
  • this is probably the most valuable hint. It also depends very much on other bahviour: Dont start eclipse more than necessary, turn off all "find stuff on the internet" options, keep your workspace small. Meaning: less than 100 bundles or something. I deal currently with like 1000. Thats too much. –  Mar 21 '19 at 21:36
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On linux you can put it into /dev/shm

sherif
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