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Showing posts from February, 2009

RAM Disks do not speed up Visual Studio

  The limiting factor for Visual Studio is disk IO. I got a tip to speed up Visual Studio from Channel 9 by creating a RAM disk which sounded like a great idea. However, when I ran a thorough set of tests, I found that the performance difference between the Ram disk and the hard disk were not appreciably different. This was a big surprise since RAM is 240,000 times faster than disk (see my previous blog post). But the reason is because Visual Studio and Vista do a lot of caching. So compile times for the same project in RAM disk and on hard disk were pretty similar. I also tested the time it took to search the entire solution for a word, and times to open a solution. There was no discernable difference!   If you still want to try it out and create your own RAM disk, you can download a simple RAMDISK.EXE utility to create a RAM disk in just a few minutes. What is a RAM Disk ?   Ramdisk is a virtual drive created in RAM.   Performance Analysis Creating files was an average

Highpoint Games

  My friend has just started his own board game company, and has released his first game “Greedy Greedy”. www.highpointgames.com Check it out, this is a game that we had a lot of fun playing many times while in Florida.