Has anybody tried to build NetBeans on an SSD drive?

[Behrang Saeedzadeh]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anybody has had the chance to build NetBeans or other large-sized Java projects on SSD drives, especially Intel's X25-M or FusionIO's ioDrive? How much does it speed up the build process if it does so at all? How about a RAID-0 config of 2 or more of these devices?

Cheers,
--
Behrang Saeedzadeh

[Wade Chandler]

I haven't, but it would have to speed it up. I mean, you will inevitably have CPU and RAM usage, but disk access is a major burden to the speed of anything having to write files. Most likely it is the highest overhead as it is certainly the slowest component. I have been wanting a solid state or large permanent RAM disk for years, but they have been so expensive. What are the costs of these disks you are referring? Obviously I'm going to look it up but hey

Wade

==================
Wade Chandler, CCE
Software Engineer and Developer, Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, NetBeans Dream Team Member, and NetBeans Board Member
http://www.certified-computer-examiner.com
http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDreamTeam
http://www.netbeans.org


From: Behrang Saeedzadeh <address-removed>
To: address-removed; address-removed
Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2008 11:48:47 AM
Subject: [nbdev] Has anybody tried to build NetBeans on an SSD drive?

Hi all,

I was wondering if anybody has had the chance to build NetBeans or other large-sized Java projects on SSD drives, especially Intel's X25-M or FusionIO's ioDrive? How much does it speed up the build process if it does so at all? How about a RAID-0 config of 2 or more of these devices?

Cheers,
--
Behrang Saeedzadeh

[Wade Chandler]

An easy experiment, if you have maybe 3GB of RAM or more, and Linux, would be to create a RAM disk, mount it, and then checkout or copy NB to it. Then you should be able to do a clean and build using Ant. That should tell you. Now, Ant uses some caching etc, and you might have to find out how to make it write that information to a location on this RAM disk as well to really achieve the full speed, I can't believe it wouldn't be extremely fast. Now you have me curious. I'll have to try this sometime soon.

Wade

==================
Wade Chandler, CCE
Software Engineer and Developer, Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, NetBeans Dream Team Member, and NetBeans Board Member
http://www.certified-computer-examiner.com
http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDreamTeam
http://www.netbeans.org


From: Wade Chandler <address-removed>
To: address-removed
Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2008 11:58:53 AM
Subject: Re: [nbdev] Has anybody tried to build NetBeans on an SSD drive?

I haven't, but it would have to speed it up. I mean, you will inevitably have CPU and RAM usage, but disk access is a major burden to the speed of anything having to write files. Most likely it is the highest overhead as it is certainly the slowest component. I have been wanting a solid state or large permanent RAM disk for years, but they have been so expensive. What are the costs of these disks you are referring? Obviously I'm going to look it up but hey

Wade

==================
Wade Chandler, CCE
Software Engineer and Developer, Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, NetBeans Dream Team Member, and NetBeans Board Member
http://www.certified-computer-examiner.com
http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDreamTeam
http://www.netbeans.org


From: Behrang Saeedzadeh <address-removed>
To: address-removed; address-removed
Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2008 11:48:47 AM
Subject: [nbdev] Has anybody tried to build NetBeans on an SSD drive?

Hi all,

I was wondering if anybody has had the chance to build NetBeans or other large-sized Java projects on SSD drives, especially Intel's X25-M or FusionIO's ioDrive? How much does it speed up the build process if it does so at all? How about a RAID-0 config of 2 or more of these devices?

Cheers,
--
Behrang Saeedzadeh

[Behrang Saeedzadeh]

Hi Wade,

The ioDrive's price is scary: $2400 for 80 gigs ( There's a cheaper alternative by the same company called ioXtreme which is $1200 but they have about 800meg/sec read and 700meg/sec write rates. They are PCI-Express devices and can only be used with desktops. Somebody was kind enough to test compiling JBoss on an ioDrive and he posted the results here: http://techfocusonly.com/w/?p=28#comment-8

However it was not done in the best config as I think JDK and swap memory were on the HDD.

Intel's X25-m is much more affordable at about $600, should be faster than VelociRaptor HDDs but to my knowledge SSDs usually have unimpressive write rates.

Another problem is that javac is not multithreaded. While a multithreaded javac may not improve compilation speeds on HDDs I guess it will dramatically improve the speed on SSDs, especially on ioDrives.

Having said all these I still don't know how much they can improve compilation time, application-server/IDE startup time, and JEE app deployment time as I haven't seen a benchmark focused on these.

Cheers,
Behrang

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:58 AM, Wade Chandler <address-removed ([email]address-removed[/email])> wrote:

[Behrang Saeedzadeh]

The other time I wanted to try this on OS X but I didn't succeed. I would love to know the results if you could do it sometime

Behrang

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:06 AM, Wade Chandler <address-removed ([email]address-removed[/email])> wrote:

[Wade Chandler]

As far as the actual IDE and an application server, and not just talking Ant goes, configuring things to use this drive, including the user directory which is commonly placed in ${HOME}/.netbeans/{version} should have a dramatic effect. You would need find out how much RAM the application uses at startup and configure the minimums to be these values so the processes are given those amounts from the start, and that would speed up many many things. That factored with a memory/RAM drive and I don't see any way it couldn't be extremely fast. Of course you will have issues with SWAP space slowing some things down, but if you have enough RAM then that shouldn't be such a factor when using those applications to keep them from being swapped out. Interesting stuff I haven't thought about in a long time. Such high costs make you put things on the back burner

Wade

==================
Wade Chandler, CCE
Software Engineer and Developer, Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, NetBeans Dream Team Member, and NetBeans Board Member
http://www.certified-computer-examiner.com
http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDreamTeam
http://www.netbeans.org


From: Behrang Saeedzadeh <address-removed>
To: address-removed
Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2008 12:10:18 PM
Subject: Re: [nbdev] Has anybody tried to build NetBeans on an SSD drive?

Hi Wade,

The ioDrive's price is scary: $2400 for 80 gigs ( There's a cheaper alternative by the same company called ioXtreme which is $1200 but they have about 800meg/sec read and 700meg/sec write rates. They are PCI-Express devices and can only be used with desktops. Somebody was kind enough to test compiling JBoss on an ioDrive and he posted the results here: http://techfocusonly.com/w/?p=28#comment-8

However it was not done in the best config as I think JDK and swap memory were on the HDD.

Intel's X25-m is much more affordable at about $600, should be faster than VelociRaptor HDDs but to my knowledge SSDs usually have unimpressive write rates.

Another problem is that javac is not multithreaded. While a multithreaded javac may not improve compilation speeds on HDDs I guess it will dramatically improve the speed on SSDs, especially on ioDrives.

Having said all these I still don't know how much they can improve compilation time, application-server/IDE startup time, and JEE app deployment time as I haven't seen a benchmark focused on these.

Cheers,
Behrang

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 3:58 AM, Wade Chandler <address-removed ([email]address-removed[/email])> wrote:

[Behrang Saeedzadeh]

I will give it a try tomorrow morning. Theoretically SSDs should get cheaper by as much as %50 a year. Just imagine being able to edit-compile-deploy a JEE app as fast as an RoR app That would be %100 pure heaven!

Behrang

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:20 AM, Wade Chandler <address-removed ([email]address-removed[/email])> wrote:

[Wade Chandler]

OK, I'll write once more, and be done as we're on the dev list, but interesting stuff.

Memories keep coming back. I was listening to the radio a while ago, and I heard a news story about a company which made new RAM which was permanent/held values when powered down. I can't remember the name of the company.

Anyways, apparently this RAM is fast too. I had thought about making an external drive which I could make some hardware interfaces using this RAM which allow me to add and remove chips as needed (obviously you can't just plug it into your motherboard without it supporting the specific chips as it doesn't need refreshed like DRAM, and won't have the same interface). Then I could write some drivers for Linux and have a fast permanent RAM disk. Now, the main thing is that without a proper interface to the faster motherboard interfaces one is relegated to the slower ones and using tricks to double, triple, etc the bandwidth, but still an idea I haven't completely forgotten, but the main thing is it takes some major time.

The nice thing about such a thing is that once the interface works correctly, and you have a bug free driver working correctly, your chances for success are high if the chips themselves have a good life span. That could make an extremely cheap alternative for small businesses wanting fast portable growth on demand storage if one could sell the components for cheap. Couple that with +Gbit Ethernet and you could really have not only an extremely fast storage solution, but a networked one to boot. The trick is in the time involved to sit down and get all the pieces together and keep your day job .

Wade

==================
Wade Chandler, CCE
Software Engineer and Developer, Certified Forensic Computer Examiner, NetBeans Dream Team Member, and NetBeans Board Member
http://www.certified-computer-examiner.com
http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDreamTeam
http://www.netbeans.org

[Casper Bang]

I am using a RAM drive since RAM has gotten so ridiculous cheap (and
NetBeans started doing scanning constantly), and have experienced build
speed improvements an order of magnitudes faster. Wrote a small blog
entry about the experience here:
http://coffeecokeandcode.blogspot.com/2008/08/netbeans-on-speed.html

/Casper

Behrang Saeedzadeh wrote: