Quicker builds on Windows by using a RAM-drive

There’s been a number of blog posts lately celebrating the use of SSD-disks for reducing build/compile times and to make your IDE snappier.
This post is about an even quicker and sometimes cheaper alternative – mount a portion of your RAM as a drive and execute builds there! I also show you how to accelerate Maven and IntelliJ using this strategy.

I have 16GB RAM on my Windows machine (my customer demands that I use Windows) of which I normally use about 3GB. What I’ve done is to set 8GB aside for a RAM-drive. Files put on my e: drive are stored directly in system memory, no need to do the round-trip to a harddrive, waiting for the data to be copied into memory. I’m developing software in Java and use the RAM-drive for my Maven builds and installs. Also, I keep IntelliJ temporary files, indexes, etc. in memory.

On Linux/Unix and MS-DOS/older Windows versions RAM-drives are easily created using tmpfs or ramdisk.sys, but on new versions of Windows, Vista and later, built-in support for RAM-drives is lacking. Enter Dataram RAMdisk. This free software does the job nicely. Typically, you’ll need a 64-bit Windows version to access more than 4GB of RAM at the same time.

Create the RAM-drive

1. Install RAMDisk
2. Configure and create the RAM-drive.
   
   Select persistence settings of the RAM-drive. Remember to save your settings.
   
   Select the size of the RAM-drive and start it up.
3. Using Server Manager, format the new drive as NTFS. After a wait of a couple of seconds, the new drive will show under “My Computer”.
   
4. [Optional] Disable indexing of files on the new drive. It is not worth it to have Windows build and maintain a search index for your build tree. Go to the new drive in explorer, for example e: and choose properties. On the bottom of the first page, uncheck “..index files..”
5. Check out your code tree to the new drive
6. Execute mvn clean package. Observe the difference in speed from building on your ordinary harddrive. In my case I get more than a 20% speedup, saving myself over five minutes on certain builds.

Put your Maven artifacts on the RAM-drive

Putting your Maven artifacts on the RAM-drive will speed up builds and installs.

The simplest solution is to just put your entire local maven repository on the RAM-drive by setting the local repository path in Maven’s settings.xml. For example, you change the location of the repository from c:Userssomeuser.m2reposistory to e:repository.

A more flexible solution, and the one I use, is to only put -my- artifacts on the RAM-drive.
I do this to save space, as my repository is a bit on the heavy side.
To get there, I used the built-inmklink command.
mklink allows you to create a directory that links to another directory.
That way I make the directory (c:someuser.m2reposistorymyartifact-root) point to e:repository-ramdisk.

The syntax is
MKLINK /J Link Target

Example:

C:Userssomeusertest>mklink /J mydir e:mydir
Junction created for mydir <<===>> e:mydir

C:Userssomeusertest>dir
 Volume in drive C is System
 Volume Serial Number is 1401-307B

 Directory of C:Userssomeusertest

06.07.2010  11:17              .
06.07.2010  11:17              ..
06.07.2010  11:17         mydir [e:mydir]
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  55 119 831 040 bytes free

C:Userssomeusertest>mkdir e:mydir

C:Userssomeusertest>cd mydir

C:Userssomeusertestmydir>dir
 Volume in drive C is System
 Volume Serial Number is 1401-307B

 Directory of C:Userssomeusertestmydir

06.07.2010  11:15              .
06.07.2010  11:15              ..
               0 File(s)              0 bytes
               2 Dir(s)   2 102 341 632 bytes free

Make IntelliJ use the RAM-drive

Putting IntelliJ’s temporary files and indexes on the RAM-drive will make it snappier, especially for large, multi-module projects.

First, make sure you have the default setting of “use maven output directories” enabled, that will make IntelliJ create class-files on the RAM-drive.

Secondly, import or load the project from the RAM-drive, for example import e:srcmymodulepom.xml as a new project.

Finally, exit IntelliJ and copy IntelliJ’s system (c:Userssomeuser.IntelliJIdea90) folder to the RAM-drive (or selected parts of that folder if you’re short on free space).
Then rename the system folder and create a link with the same name, pointing to the folder on the RAM-drive (using mklink as in the previous section).

Make files on the RAM-drive persistent across reboots

There is of course the option of just checking out the source code and downloading the maven artifacts anew after a reboot. You can even script this task to do it automatically at startup.

If you want some file safety in case the computer crashes, there is a loss of power or so, you can have Dataram RAMdisk write the RAM-drive to disk automatically and regularly.
Also, it can persist and load the RAM-drive at shutdown and startup, by selecting the ‘auto save’ option as shown in the first screenshots. making the RAM-drive appear completely like a normal drive. Tweak the settings to your liking, and remember to save them 🙂