Speed up your compilation time with Visual Studio drastically with this tip, especially with large projects.
Working from memory is always faster than working from disk. It would be a huge improvement to use Solid State harddrives as much as possible, but those are still quite expensive.
I always thought that the bottleneck for my PC was the CPU. Until I started to use the Moo0 system monitor (see picture on the right), which has clearly shown me that in 100% of the cases where there is a bottleneck, it is the harddrive.
Since memoryusage was only 30% most of the time, I figured that I might use some of my memory as a RAM-disk and work from a virtual disk that exists in memory only. There is a free RAM-disk utility that can be downloaded from mydigitallife.info. It credits Microsoft, Gavotte and lyh728 for the software.
The disadvantage of a RAM-disk is that all your carefully crafted contents are deleted once you restart your PC.
I solved this by synchronizing the RAM-disk with the c# project directory on disk where the code resides. There is an excellent synchronization utility called SyncBack which has a free edition. I told it to synchronize every 15 minutes, so I will lose fifteen minutes work at most. In most cases it only takes seconds to synchronize the changes, so I could synchronize more frequently.
All of the code and a few of the required dll's are now served from memory. This really sped up my compilation time. Are there more usages of this mechanism? The browser cache on RAM-disk? Outlook PST files? SQL server data files? How much more memory can my PC have...? How much does it cost...?
