Faster NetBeans? Yes, it is posible… :)

Contributed by: Emmanuel Oga; First published in his blog here

Yeah NetBeans can be slow sometime. So you say you had some megas of ram unused? Great. This trick is as old as … as something very old :-). I remember using this same thing to speed up quake on ms-dos.

• Uninstall Netbeans

 sudo mkdir /media/ramdisk
 sudo mount -t tmpfs none /media/ramdisk

• Then install netbeans to /media/ramdisk

That’s all :)

Off course, you will need a decent amount of ram. NetBeans uses like 95mb of disk for version 6.0.1 (linux)

I found that tmpfs writes its contents to the directory it was mounted to once you unmount it, so it should persist its contents between system boots! I just needed to update /etc/fstab with this line: “tmpfs /media/ramdisk tmpfs”

For Windoze, you should Google for ramdisk support. I can’t get precise measures on the gain in performance, but I found that installing NB to ram really speeds things up. Now I should try to install the whole ruby interpreter in my ramdisk ….

UPDATE:

Amit Kumar Saha pointed out that tmpfs does not keep its contents to the disk on reboot. He is right. I manually unmounted the ram disk an it _did_ keep its contents to the disk, so I thought it was going to keep the contents also when booting. But when I did boot my pc, it didn’t work the same. To work around this, I did a tar package of my installation:

   cd /media/ramdisk
   tar cvvzf /home/emmanuel/tar/nb601.tar.gz netbeans-6.0.1/

Then added this line to my /etc/rc.local:

  tar xvvzf /home/emmanuel/tar/nb601.tar.gz -C /media/ramdisk