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At first I hope creating such a question on Stackeroverflow is ok, if not tell me :)

I have 16GB of DDR3 RAM and I think it could be possible to speed up VisualStudio and Resharper by creating a RAM Disk.

Does anyone of you have made experience with such a scenario or can you give me some tips?

My idea is to install/copy Visual studio, Resharper and solution files to the RAM Disk.

Rookian
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    The quickest and easiest speedup is to use an SSD instead of those rotating thingies that my dad used to use. – Martin James Jan 06 '12 at 20:57
  • For now SSD's cost too much, unfortunately. DDR3 RAM is really cheap. 80€ for 16GB is great. – Rookian Jan 06 '12 at 20:59
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    Cost tooo much? You can get a 64GB SSD for 80€... – Dean Kuga Jan 06 '12 at 22:11
  • If you use RAM, be careful where your source is autosaved to. If you had mains power as reliable as mine, (long line - bad weather and canada geese cause blackouts), you would not be wanting to save source to a RAMdisk unless you have a UPS, (or a laptop). – Martin James Jan 07 '12 at 00:20

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I assume that by "installing VS onto RAM Disk" you mean that you'll use NTFS to map the expected Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio folder onto RAM? The reason I'm asking is that AFAIK you're forced to install the bulk of VS onto your system drive, and you cannot override that.

As the other commenter said, get an SSD first. Get those expensive PCI-driven ones (such as OCS IBIS). Take a look at performance. Then decide if you really need RAM. And if you decide that you do, try mapping just the TMP/TEMP folders onto RAM and then starting up VS with that and seeing how it works. My guess is, you'll get a modest improvement, but nothing to write home about, unless you're using a 5200RPM disk (and even then...)

Dmitri Nesteruk
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  • Any old SSD is hugely better than spinners. My wife and I both have Atom-powered, (not literally - you know what I mean), notebooks. Mine has a 64MB SSD, boots in seconds and is useable for Office, C#, Delphi. The other one, with its 320GB energy-saver whirler needs 2 coffees just to get to the desktop, or five coffees and a cigar if there are 'Critical security updates' or Kaspersky 'Databases are out-of-date'. – Martin James Jan 07 '12 at 00:31
  • @Dmitri Nesteruk you are right, parts of VS2010 have to be installed on system drive :[ – Rookian Jan 07 '12 at 09:39
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I have tried this scenario, and it does not bring big improvements, the problem is in "C:\Windows\assembly" folder which has around 3Gb as this folder contains all .NET assemblies it is accessed often by VS on start/close, I don't know if it can be linked to another folder. In my case I have a big solution and compiling on HDD it takes to much time. So I moved to RAMDisk only the source code and compile time was improved dramatically. To speed up VS just buy an SSD. Resharper is using the cache folder which by default is in the solution foder, and having solution in RAMDisk is speeding it up, or you can configure only the cache folder to be in RAMDisk.

deathgore
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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.

Community
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Meo
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