using a SSD with Visual Studio ... setup?
-
David Knechtges wrote:
The same project on the SSD takes about 40 seconds to complete.
That's not long enough to visit the Lounge. :sigh:
What a silly thing to go and do!
-
What a silly thing to go and do!
Too right! What kind of idiot wants to load Visual Studio!
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
-
I use an SSD for my primary dev box (2 actually). The main one has all the OS, tools, VS, and all my applications I use installed on it. The second one contains all my solutions, source code, and everything else. I also have 3 other HDs for virtual machines and things like that. I would HIGHLY recommend that you do all your compilation on the SSD. The speed increase is ENORMOUS. In my system, I have a solution that has 28 different projects contained in it, and a full build on a 7200 RPM standard hard disk would take on the order of 10 minutes to complete (a mixture of C# and C++). The same project on the SSD takes about 40 seconds to complete.
What versopn of VS, and incremental or full rebuild?
FILETIME to time_t
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
I use an SSD for my primary dev box (2 actually). The main one has all the OS, tools, VS, and all my applications I use installed on it. The second one contains all my solutions, source code, and everything else. I also have 3 other HDs for virtual machines and things like that. I would HIGHLY recommend that you do all your compilation on the SSD. The speed increase is ENORMOUS. In my system, I have a solution that has 28 different projects contained in it, and a full build on a 7200 RPM standard hard disk would take on the order of 10 minutes to complete (a mixture of C# and C++). The same project on the SSD takes about 40 seconds to complete.
David Knechtges wrote:
I would HIGHLY recommend that you do all your compilation on the SSD.
Seconded
CPallini wrote:
You cannot argue with agile people so just take the extreme approach and shoot him. :Smile:
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
First, put your seatbelt on. You'll be amazed. Second, as others have indicated, anything that hits a disk many times (like compiling projects), will benefit enormously from the SSD speed. Other than that, the only two downsides to SSDs is their cost (happily dropping) and their past habit of catostrophic failure. Mechanical drives tend to report errors, sound funny, etc. SSDs just go poof. Happily, this is becoming less and less an issue. But have good backups. ps - I'm about to upgrade my wife's laptop from a 5400 rpm to a SSD. Zoom, zoom.
Charlie Gilley You're going to tell me what I want to know, or I'm going to beat you to death in your own house. "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
In my company, we did an evaluation of SSDs a few months ago. We built all our C/C++ projects with VS 2008 and 2010 (on Windows 7) on a RAID-ed HDD and on a SSD, and the results were mixed. For the operating system, swap file, and temporary directory, OH YES! You definitely want SSDs. They really make a massive difference in booting time and general performance of the OS. However, for repeated Visual Studio builds the improvement was not as good as we expected. If you just time the first build, then yes, SSDs completely overwhelm HDDs. However, if you build the same project several times and average them out, then the performance becomes comparable (with a slight improvement with SSDs, but nothing major). The reason for this is that Windows 7 keeps a file cache in memory, and if you have enough free memory it is able to cache all the files in your project. Which means that after the first compilation, if you change only a small number of files, it reads the others from memory rather than disk. In your day-to-day programming, what you do is mostly a rebuild at the start of the day, and incremental builds later. Of course, you might change a header file and have to recompile a lot of cpp files, but if you haven't changed them they will still be in the memory cache. Therefore, SSDs tend to save you some time only in the first build. Our conclusion was that you definitely want your OS on an SSD, but it's not too necessary to have your VS projects and source code on it. Still, if you have the cash to buy them, why not? :-)
-+ HHexo +-
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
If your stuff is disk intensive then yes it will improve performance. My 'stuff' was and still is more processing based and while the load times are nice the cost wasn't worth it but I only sent mine back as it resulted in a consistant blue screen issue, just got unlucky.
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
Here's a story: I have a laptop, with one HD of 7200 RPM, 0,5 TB (Windows 7, 64 bit). From cold boot to "All Ready" (ie. no more hourcircle running) I measured 1m 30s. Of these, about 15-18 sec was not HD related as that was fishing around in BIOS or something. I cloned the HD, and replaced it with a SSD drive of nearly same capacity (not cheap, but hey - I'm loaded :-O !). The result: I measured now 29 sec of complete cold boot - "All Ready". Notice that I have everything on the same drive. That includes VS that now roars into action. Even web browsing is way faster, due to the cached images and wtn. So: You do the math - is it worth it?
-
I use an SSD for my primary dev box (2 actually). The main one has all the OS, tools, VS, and all my applications I use installed on it. The second one contains all my solutions, source code, and everything else. I also have 3 other HDs for virtual machines and things like that. I would HIGHLY recommend that you do all your compilation on the SSD. The speed increase is ENORMOUS. In my system, I have a solution that has 28 different projects contained in it, and a full build on a 7200 RPM standard hard disk would take on the order of 10 minutes to complete (a mixture of C# and C++). The same project on the SSD takes about 40 seconds to complete.
10 minutes down to 40 seconds? Then there was something seriously wrong with your 7200 rpm disks.
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
-
Here's a story: I have a laptop, with one HD of 7200 RPM, 0,5 TB (Windows 7, 64 bit). From cold boot to "All Ready" (ie. no more hourcircle running) I measured 1m 30s. Of these, about 15-18 sec was not HD related as that was fishing around in BIOS or something. I cloned the HD, and replaced it with a SSD drive of nearly same capacity (not cheap, but hey - I'm loaded :-O !). The result: I measured now 29 sec of complete cold boot - "All Ready". Notice that I have everything on the same drive. That includes VS that now roars into action. Even web browsing is way faster, due to the cached images and wtn. So: You do the math - is it worth it?
For my money, ANYTHING to speed up your work computer is worthwhile. The most expensive part of a PC is the operator! Also, each time a developer is interrupted (phone call, email, announcement, etc.), it takes about 20 minutes to get back up to speed. So, if a 30-second compilation does not interrupt you, but a 10-minute one does, you're talking about taking a 30-minute interruption, or probably about $50 charged. I'd say in a couple of days you'd pay for that SSD!
-
10 minutes down to 40 seconds? Then there was something seriously wrong with your 7200 rpm disks.
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
-
10 minutes down to 40 seconds? Then there was something seriously wrong with your 7200 rpm disks.
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
Based on what?
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
In addition to the improved build speeds, I find Search/Replace across large solutions MUCH faster with an SSD. I can search the entire code base almost instantly, whereas accessing thousands of files on a HDD can be seriously underwhelming. So on my SSD I have Windows, Apps, VS2010, and my VS solutions and code. Robert
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
We found that putting the working copies of our projects on the SSD and the OS on the HDD gave us very good performance all-round. Windows 7 with enough RAM (we have 8g) will cache much of the oft used parts of the OS and Visual Studio in memory anyway, and you still get the reliability of a HDD. One of our guys experimented with the swap file (I don't remember if he did something like a RAM drive, or what; he's not here anymore to ask) that had the effect of putting it in memory, that sped things up even more, but nobody else has done that. The working copies on the SSD are pretty fast, but as others noted, the most significant speed up is when doing a full build. Incremental ones don't benefit as much. However, all the other ancillary operations, searching, checking out, checking in, etc, are faster as well. Putting ony non-critical stuff on the SSD reduces the risk of downtime due to a, fortunately much less frequent these days, failure of the SSD.
Currently reading: "The Prince", by Nicolo Machiavelli
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
I have an SSD in my machine, but use a 7500 rpm for code storage. I do tons of Chromium development (the browser) and a normal build with 695 projects takes roughly 4 hours. When I get home, I'll drop the code on my ssd and run a compile. there are TONS of disk I/O operations during the build. I'll post up my results for you all to use as a reference.
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
Actually I have all my OS, programs, VS, solutions, personal data files, music... basically everything on my SSD; but I do a backup of all the important stuff to a NAS every night (VS files and solutions) and a full drive back up to my secondary HD once a week, just in case the SSD decides to dump. But WOW you can't beat the SSD speed.
-
For my money, ANYTHING to speed up your work computer is worthwhile. The most expensive part of a PC is the operator! Also, each time a developer is interrupted (phone call, email, announcement, etc.), it takes about 20 minutes to get back up to speed. So, if a 30-second compilation does not interrupt you, but a 10-minute one does, you're talking about taking a 30-minute interruption, or probably about $50 charged. I'd say in a couple of days you'd pay for that SSD!
The end justify the means… :laugh:
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
-
Based on what?
To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson ---- Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction - Francis Picabia
Because my own measurements show a speedup between 2x to 4x, when going from a 7200 RPM SATA disk to a 6 Gbps SSD (OCZ Vertex 3, Sandy Bridge). Consistently so on at least three machines. A 15x speedup sounds unreal to me, unless there was something very wrong with his previous disk.
-- Kein Mitleid Für Die Mehrheit
-
We found that putting the working copies of our projects on the SSD and the OS on the HDD gave us very good performance all-round. Windows 7 with enough RAM (we have 8g) will cache much of the oft used parts of the OS and Visual Studio in memory anyway, and you still get the reliability of a HDD. One of our guys experimented with the swap file (I don't remember if he did something like a RAM drive, or what; he's not here anymore to ask) that had the effect of putting it in memory, that sped things up even more, but nobody else has done that. The working copies on the SSD are pretty fast, but as others noted, the most significant speed up is when doing a full build. Incremental ones don't benefit as much. However, all the other ancillary operations, searching, checking out, checking in, etc, are faster as well. Putting ony non-critical stuff on the SSD reduces the risk of downtime due to a, fortunately much less frequent these days, failure of the SSD.
Currently reading: "The Prince", by Nicolo Machiavelli
one word. Sexy
-
My new work machine will come in soon. One of the feature that I have asked and obtained is a SSD drive. :-D What is the best practice when using a SSD drive and Windows 7 and Visual Studio (2008, 2010, 2012) and mostly/mainly C++ code ? Have the OS, "Program Files" all on the SSD and the project files (project solution, source files) as well ? And all the data on another drive ? Thanks.
Watched code never compiles.
SSD is a dog. Definitely in ideal case it works faster, but since product of stupid Gates permanently writes cr@p on disk (emulating robustness), your poor SSD will indefinitely reallocate sectors to write every portion of data. What, as you guess, will decrease perfomance. Second issue is reliability - after year your SSD will go slower and slower - again thanks stupids from MS. So best practice is using SSD in scenario "write once, many reads", like DVD or strimmer. :)