SSDs and Visual Studio IDEs. Big improvements? Real use stories, no theory

Question

I want to upgrade to Windows 7 + Intel SSDs to speed up the Visual Studio 2008 development cycle.

The areas I want to speed up are as follows:

• Compilation / build time
• Opening files for winforms / webforms
• Generic Visual Studio "sluggishnes" for Windows and the Internet

I am not interested in the startup time of Visual Studio. Also, the cost of one GB is not a problem. I want speed.

Has anyone tried this ( SSD + Visual Studio ) already and what can you say about accelerations / crashes?

I know the theory about SSDs, but usually evidence of food pudding. So I'm interested in people who actually tried and tested the installation of Visual Studio using SSD ...

Answer 1

I have hard data for Visual C # 2008. In short, you better spend your money on a faster processor than faster I / O. A longer answer follows ...

Our C # solution (.NET 3.5) contains 81 projects with more than 2M lines of code (including comments and blank lines). A couple of years ago we upgraded the Pentium 4 3 and GHz PCs with standard hard drives to the Core 2 Duo 2.6 and GHz PCs with 10,000 bit / s (74 GB) RPM WD Raptor disk drives. The acceleration was huge. About 10 minutes to 3.5 minutes. All this in a 32-bit Windows XP Pro environment with 4 operational RAM.

We also have one Gigabyte i-RAM (for it it is intended for information), which is basically a RAM hard drive with a backup battery. Unlike an SSD, which is quick to read but slower to write, i-RAM works quickly for both, but if you lose power, the battery lasts about 12 hours, so you should be disciplined with your checks. This will shave off another minute from the moment of compilation on the Core 2 Dou platform (up to 2.5 minutes) compared to the Raptor HDD at 10,000 rpm.

Since then, I found that these old 74,000 Raptor disks of 10,000 rpm are a bit slower than your modern 7200 rpm garden drive, and we have proven that it constantly compiles compilations. We did not try the new Velociraptors, but they, of course, would be faster, but probably not enough to cost them only for compilation.

Last week, we got a new Intel Core i7-870 platform with a G.Skill Falcon 128 SSD SSD (with Indibix Barefoot controller) and a standard 500-inch GB-HDD as a second drive. I also launched i-RAM on this PC and tested all the configurations.

Compared to Core 2 Duo, which compiles in 3.5 minutes for HDD and 2.5 minutes for i-RAM, the i7-870 in 1 minute 40 seconds for SSD, HDD and i-RAM. take 3 seconds.

So, both times when we updated developer workstations, the vast majority of performance improvements during C # compilation were faster than faster than on a faster drive. If you want to speed up compilation time, put the money in the processor, not on the disk.

However, the SSD loads Visual Studio a lot faster and opens the solution (although I don't have timings for this). If you can afford an SSD, you will never return, since every program on your computer loads so fast that it is unbelievable. But this will not significantly speed up your compilation. And the fact that Visual Studio C # is single-threaded. If Microsoft ever got the combined action and turned its compiler into a multi-threaded IDE, we could use these four cores ...

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Update May 2012: Now we have updated our computers and based on what we learned before focusing on processor performance. New PCs have Intel Core i7-2600k processors overclocked to 4.6 GHz, with Intel S105 SSD, 16 GB and a large processor cooler! Surprisingly, this reduced the compilation time by almost half, and of course I put this on a very large increase in processor power, and not on a faster SSD.

Compiling C # into Visual, the performance results in Studio 2010 were:

• 159 seconds: Battery Intel Core i7-870 (2.9 - 3.3 GHz), 4 GB RAM with SSD SATA II
• 109 seconds: Intel Core i7-2600k (3.4 - 3.8 GHz) 16 GB RAM with SSD SSD
• 84 seconds: Intel Core i7-2600k overclocked (4.63 GHz) 16 GB RAM with SSD SSD

Answer 2

I just bought one, and the only regret I have is not buying an SSD before.

Compilation time was already good, but now the entire IDE is much more responsive. And this is not only Visual Studio, but also other applications. It is simply much easier to stay in the stream when the whole system is running so fast.

Answer 3

As a test, we just ordered an SSD for 90% SS Sandforce to see if this could help our build time. We have a large C ++ project that takes 21 minutes to complete a complete rebuild (an earlier Xeon 3.4 GHz unit.)

Performing three tests on each, the time difference in the lines was insignificant; 30 seconds faster.

Our new (!) Xeon 5150 block (with a hard disk) restores the same project in ~ 11 minutes, which suggests that the compilation is really connected with the processor.

(This surprised me since I thought that the awesome 4k and 512k read / write SSD performance would be very useful in builds.)

Answer 4

After lengthy performance tests, I got the best setup here, but for the C ++ compiler. You will need:

• SSD for Windows and program files (usually a C drive :)
• 1 TB WD Caviar Black in two sections:
  • Drive D: tiny (max. 35 GB) in start cylinders having only the TEMP folder; You must map the environment variables TMP and TEMP to D: \ TEMP (this is really important !!!)
  • Drive E: with the rest of the drive; use this for general data storage, with the exception of software development materials.
• 1 TB WD Caviar Black in any section layout that you want to keep in Visual Studio 2008 projects. Based on using Subversion, I ended up with four sections:
  • 820 GB for trunk and general purpose projects
  • 60 GB for the "feature branch"
  • 60 GB for the "stable branch" used to stabilize the product.
  • 60 GB for the "product quality branch" used for minor patches in approved software.
• 6-core or 8-core processor using the compiler / MP compiler (do not get confused with Visual Studio, built-in parallel assembly function in 2008 - I do not know why the AMD Phenon II processor works so well with this combination)
• 64-bit versions of Windows 7 (I'm not quite sure why it works faster on a 64-bit OS, even using a 32-bit compiler)
• SATA 3 compatible motherboard

This setting is superior to any other combination that I tested.

A typical compilation of a huge modular project will have the following results:

• Parallel build without / MP and conventional hard drives: about 12:00 minutes
• This suggested setting is 4:30 minutes
• This setting, but with alternating WD Caviar Green drives: +1: 00 per drive (5:30 or 6:30 for both).
• Moving the TEMP partition to RAMDRIVE: 5:30

My findings are as follows:

• Do not let the TEMP folder run in SSDs, as they are bad “writers” and do not have a comparable 64 MB cache inside WD Caviar Black
• Using a dedicated disk that works like TEMP allows you to work with WD disks simultaneously: TEMP files for temp.exe files and a project disk for storing * .cpp / h, * .obj, * .lib, * .exe, etc.
• WD Caviar Black caching algorithms are impressive, combined with SATA 6 GB / s, outperform the RAMDRIVE setting I tested for a TEMP drive.
• Separation reduces the effect on fragmentation, which is inevitable in a compiler environment; the same is true for the TEMP drive.

I hope I can help you.

Answer 5

I just upgraded my laptop to SSD by cloning an original 5400 bps hard drive (a surprisingly painless process). I used a stopwatch to capture before and after indicators. (Dell Inspiron 1525, 3 GB RAM, 32-bit version of Windows Vista)

Download / start Windows

63 seconds → 52 seconds

Downloading my Visual Studio for ASP.NET Solution

In other words, the time from clicking on the .sln file to the full download of Visual Studio, and you can start coding. I did this once before the measurement, because the first time always takes longer than the subsequent ones.

16 seconds → 8 seconds.

Debugging

F5 to a fully loaded homepage.

5 seconds → 3.5 seconds

Answer 6

See Joel Spolsky's article Solid State Drives (2009-03-27).

Answer 7

When I bought a new computer, I was not sure what accelerated my experience.

However, my colleague changed the 7200-inch RPM hard drive to SSD. Immediately Visual Studio (especially ASP.NET startup / debugging) was at least twice as fast!

Answer 8

I also considered this, and some time ago I bought a quick one that I can insert into a laptop and forget about it, so that Windows Vista can use ReadyBoost feauture. It seems like it matters, but of course, this is not enough to guarantee the purchase of an SSD for just that.

Then I began to encounter problems when upgrading Subversion and decided to abandon the ReadyBoost idea and install the SD disk on the mount point, where I then created all my project files. The SD card is not very large (1 GB), but it certainly reduced the latency for assembly and will speed up debugging of a faster bit.

Most of this is subjective, and I answer the question that wants facts, "I feel it" and "I feel it." Due to my experiments with running Visual Studio files from another drive, I certainly think that it will matter how much and how much I am willing to pay for it, I am also keenly looking for an answer. My laptop can take another hard drive, and I could not solve the problem between the SDD and the 7200-inch RPM laptop.