Perhaps for first-time loading it would make a difference, as that data would tend not to be in the cache and thus would need to come off of (slow) disk the first time.Ģ7% may not sound like a lot to some people. I’m guessing it would help, but probably not too dramatically since SQL Server will already aggressively use available memory to cache things. I haven’t yet tried putting the database into a RAMDisk. Again, the database calls are all still going against my local SQL Server, which is still on the C (magnetic) drive, so these gains are primarily in the build and unit-test load/exec times.

Total time: 2 minutes 7 seconds – about 27% faster. Next, I copied the folder to my G drive, which is the 1GB RAMDisk, and ran the exact same script again. So, not quite 3 minutes to run the solution with all of its unit and integration tests off of the C magnetic drive. At the moment I’m in the middle of fixing a problem in the build, but the Time Elapsed is the important aspect to show here:

Note that most of the time spent is in the integration tests, which go against a local SQL Server database, which is running on the hard drive.

Next, I ran my ClickToBuild.bat script from my laptop’s 7200 RPM hard drive. I set up a 1GB RAMDisk using Dataram RAMDisk (free version!). Like Jeffrey, I have a ClickToBuild.bat file that will run my build as well as run all of the unit and integration tests for a given project. However, recently I’ve gotten a new laptop and maxed it out with 8GB of RAM and Windows 7 64-bit. Jeffrey Palermo wrote about six months ago about a few options for using RAM drives to speed up builds, and at the time my primary laptop only had 3GB of RAM so I wasn’t able to take advantage of his advice.

Now that computers with 64-bit operating systems and 8 or 12 GB of RAM are pretty affordable, there are some fairly easy things you can do to speed up your build time for large project.

Softperfect ram disk slow