Speed up VisualStudio 2010 and Resharper 6.1: Is it worth to use RamDisk?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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...)

Answer 2

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.