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Do ramdisks really improve vs2010 performance (general and build times)?

If so, what are all the steps I have to do to get the maximum benefit of it? Can it also help resharper?

Thanks, André Carlucci

andrecarlucci
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3 Answers3

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in my experience RamDisk is slower than SSD for build. it can be even slower than HDD... RAMdisk slower than disk?

so do not bother with RamDisk and buy Intel or Crucial SSD, but not OCZ.

EDIT:

After many tries I figured it out. When ramdisk is formatted as FAT32, then even though benchmarks shows high values, real world use is actually slower than NTFS formatted SSD. But NTFS formatted ramdisk is faster in real life than SSD. But I would not bother with Ramdisk anyway, SSD is everything you need.

Community
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Meo
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  • CrucialSSD's have a problem with the many writes that occur when compiling code. I would not go with Crucial. I have a Crucial RealSSD and I've hit a wall now because of the significant amount of writes and deletes I've done on it. It might not matter with the new firmware for the Crucial SSD's as long as you are using Windows 7 and TRIM is being used by the OS. – Andrew T Finnell Aug 01 '12 at 13:58
  • Also the article you linked to is not the same scenario as building a substantial amount of code. Building large projects will destroy the drive cache making it not as important. That gentlemen was writing 100k then reading it back. Not the same as reading and writing compiled code across hundreds of files. – Andrew T Finnell Aug 01 '12 at 14:00
  • I have figured it out, I was using FAT32 ramdisk, which is fast in benchmarks, but slow in real use. NTFS is much faster. – Meo Jun 07 '13 at 23:45
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    Thanks for this. With FAT on the RAMDisk, my build went from 44sec (on an Intel SSD) to 66sec. With NTFS on the disk it went down to 30s. Not amazing... but still worth it. – Damien Sawyer May 23 '14 at 05:08
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    Another huge improvement might be antivirus exclusion, obviously. – Meo May 23 '14 at 09:34
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So here is the issue that you will run into. Yes it can improve performance with some serious buts:

  • You stand the chance of losing all your work between syncs.
  • There is a noticeable lag when the ramdisk sync's to disc.

This will require you to setup proper sync times for how you work.

I'd recommend getting a SATA III Solid-State Drive and back it up weekly.

Andrew T Finnell
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I have tried ram disk 1 or 2 years ago. I remember that the build time was about 30% faster.
That was too few to top the disadvantages as mentioned by Andrew Finnell.

brgerner
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  • I checked it now with entire Visual Studio 2017 solution on RamDisk and noticed 60% faster solution builds but the biggest problem is It cannot debug project at all. https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/43004/cannot-debug-program-when-compiled-to-ram-drive.html – Krzysztof Gapski Jul 17 '17 at 08:26
  • As per the thread, the debugging issue was with ImDisk, not so much with using other RAM disk tools for accelerating VS. – StarShine Mar 30 '22 at 14:58