Just wondering, did anyone try running Gradle in m...

# gradle

[Rok Koncina]

Just wondering, did anyone try running Gradle in memory? Like instead of having buildDir on a drive (HDD or SSD), having it in the memory. With 64+ GB of memory you should easily be able to donate 10 GB to the build, right?

[Emil Kantis]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29116000/gradle-make-use-of-ramdisk

[mbonnin]

I would expect the OS to cache the hard drive much better than what I can do manually

[Rok Koncina]

It's not about caching, it's about avoiding the hard drive altogether. Ram is supposed to be 30x faster than SSD. Emil's idea is a good one, I have to try it.

[mbonnin]

Well, if you cache your hard drive, you're not accessing it anymore

[Rok Koncina]

I wish Grade would support that directly, then you wouldn't lose speed on the emulation... But I guess sometimes one needs to access intermediate files...

[Rok Koncina]

Oh, I see what you mean. Can you do that? Can you do it for a folder or does it have to be the whole drive? I don't have enough memory to cache it all

[mbonnin]

Linux caches disks reads/writes by default: https://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/buffer-cache.html

[mbonnin]

MacOS too. The OS knows better what is accessed and how often it is accessed

[mbonnin]

You don't want your window manager to OOM for an example by giving too much memory for Gradle build dir

[Rok Koncina]

Not really. Cache everything except maybe the final output file. Any logic on top of that is a waste of resources. Can I tell the os to behave like that?

[mbonnin]

You want to persist the intermediate results so that subsequent invocations of Gradle can reuse them

[Rok Koncina]

OOM is not a problem. Limit 10GB for Gradle, more than enough for the build and dependencies.

[mbonnin]

The persistence deosn't have to be synchronous though. Your OS will put everything in cache and persist it if memory is scarce/needed for something else

[mbonnin]

If you really want this I guess you can mount a RAM only file system at $project/build but my hunch is that it's a lot of trouble for very little (if any) benefit

[Emil Kantis]

Tried ramdisk in a multimodule setup.. but I'm just getting loads of issues where gradle incorrectly starts detecting implicit dependencies 🤷