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I recently experimented with a ram disk. Practically it didn't change anything.

OS-caching seems to already be clever enough and once the OS has figured out that some directories are important anything in there seemed to get done in RAM anyway.

A RAM-disk will make this less black box and more deterministic regarding guaranteed access times, but in daily use the RAM-disk just didn't make a difference.

discuss

ghusbands|5 years ago

Which OS? And were you already on SSD? Those can both greatly influence the outcome.

WildParser|5 years ago

I'm on Windows. Other OS may differ. I experimented a lot with load times - and compared HDD, SSD, RAM-Disk.

I wrote a small program that loads everything from a big code-repository into RAM. The first time HDD and SSD and RAM-Disk make a big difference, when reading files a second time the lag of HDD (50s?) almost disappeared completely. Caching kicked in.

The RAM-Disk has less initial lag, but also it has to be filled first, so instead of moving everything to RAM-Disk just touching everything so the OS-Caching kicks in is just faster and more convenient.