A coworker approached us today wondering if they might get a performance increase utilizing Samsung’s recently revealed 256GB SSD. many of their work is performed in browser, so we stated “no”. They’d only see benefit if they were reading/writing big files. Their system has lots of RAM, as well as we chose to take a different approach. By producing a filesystem in RAM, you can checked out as well as compose data much quicker than on a common difficult drive. We chose to put the browser’s data cache into RAM.

We installed the Espérance DV preference pane in OSX to facilitate RAM disk creation. It’s truly easy to setup. just choose exactly how much area you want to devote to the disk as well as produce it. You can have Espérance DV recreate the RAM disk on begin as well as even have it immediately bring back from a disk image. There is a inspect box for moving Safari’s web Cache to the RAM disk, which produces the required symlink. You can likewise utilize it to speed up Xcode builds. moving Firefox’s cache is relatively simple:

$ rm -r ~/Library/Caches/Firefox
$ ln -s /Volumes/RamDisk/Firefox ~/Library/Caches/Firefox

Since the browser isn’t having to hit the difficult disk on every page tons anymore, the performance is much snappier. Xbench states our random reads from RAM are now 86.19MB/sec instead of 0.61MB/sec when the cache was on the difficult drive.

We promptly began searching for methods to get the entire OS into RAM; Tin Hat is a version of Linux that does that.

We’re extremely pleased with the results of our RAM disk browser upgrade. let us understand in the comments if you’ve had a similar experience doing this in Windows.