Performance of IDEA on SSD drives
Has anybody installed IDEA on an SSD drive (or 2x, 3x, ..., nx RAID-0) SSD drives? How does IDEA's performance on SSDs compare to its performance on HDDs?
Cheers,
Behi
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I have IDEA installed on an OCZ Core Series V2 SSD drive, though I have my
.IntelliJIdea8x directory on a 10k rpm HDD. Needless to say it starts up
and performs very very well, though it's hard to give a good comparison because
this was a new and fast machine (3.7GHz Core i7, 6GB RAM), compared to my
old AMD X2 4200 box.
To give some indication of performance, it takes 7 seconds from launching
IDEA until I see the IDEA application window, and a further 8 seconds for
my current project to load and be ready to edit (fairly small, 150-odd classes).
This looks cool. But can you do a side-by-side comparison? Also why have you decided to put the .IntelliJIdea8x directory on the HDD?
PS: is it possible for you to build a moderately large or medium-sized Java project like JBoss or something smaller both on the SSD and the 10K drive and compare the time it takes to build on each?
Although, as you are using both an HDD and an SSD it is kind of difficult to come up with a good comparison of SSDs and HDDs...
Cheers,
Behi
Behrang Saeedzadeh wrote:
I'm guessing that's probably due to the limited write cycles of the SSD,
and the fact write speed is slower...
>> This looks cool. But can you do a side-by-side comparison? Also why
>> have you decided to put the .IntelliJIdea8x directory on the HDD?
>>
Exactly. I have all my applications (and Java libraries etc) installed on
the SSD. Anything that is heavily modified (eg browser caches, .IntelliJIdea8x,
tmp, pagefile, ...) live elsewhere. I already did some benchmarking (not
with IDEA) when I first got this setup which confirmed my approach works
well and I wouldn't expect IDEA to behave much differently.
Bear in mind though that some of the more recently announced SSDs have greatly
increased write performance and it's possible they'd trounce a HDD in most/all
situations (though write cycles is still an issue), so I don't think any
numbers I produce for you would be of much use unless you had a very similar
setup.
I have my .IntelliJIdea8x folder on a OCZ Core v1 64GB drive. The SSD
drive increased the performance of all of my applications, but I don't
anymore remember how much exactly IDEA was affected by it. In any case,
a SSD drive is worth its price (even a bad SSD like OCZ Core - when
optimized properly).
I have disabled updating the last access timestamps on that file system
(the approach I used is attached to this message). When last access
timestamps are disabled, all reads are pure reads - otherwise all reads
also perform a write when updating the file's timestamp.
I believe that IDEA does not do many random writes to its caches,
because I don't experience any stuttering when using IDEA, and this SSD
drive is infamous for its 4 IOPS random write speed, so any
random-write-heavy programs will surely be found out with it. ;) You can
check with Sysinternals File Monitor that what applications are writing
and reading which files.
I still have to keep my source code on a traditional HDD, because
compiling a Java project produces lots of random writes of small .class
files. OCZ Core can not handle that well, so it's much faster to compile
them on a basic 7200rpm HDD. I'm thinking about switching this SSD to
Intel X25-M 80GB, because that is one of the few SSD drives that can
handle random writes well and are not too expensive.
--
Esko Luontola
www.orfjackal.net
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1. Find out which programs do many random writes (with Sysinternals Filemon - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896642.aspx), and move the files being modified to a traditional HDD. Use junctions and symbolic links (HardLinkShellExt - http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinks...kshellext.html) when the path can not be changed (e.g. "C:\Documents and Settings\MyUsername\Local Settings").
2. Disable the file system's updating of last access timestamps (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...in-windows-xp/)
The first tweak solved freezing during program use (for example a web browser's cache does many random writes). Use Filemon to monitor all writes to your SSD drive and when you experience freezing, look at Filemon's output to see which files are being written just then. Then move that directory/files to a regular HDD drive. If the directory's path can not be changed, create junctions with HardLinkShellExt so that the path will remain the same but the files are physically on a different drive.
In my case moving the Local Settings folder to a HDD helped, because most of the programs have their temp and cache directories under Local Settings. To be able to replace Local Settings with a junction, I had to log in as a different use, because otherwise Windows has locks on some files in that directory. Also I moved all my software project files to a HDD, because compiling Java code creates many small files, which caused freezing.
After the first tweak I still had some problems with Windows startup and Locate32 (http://www.locate32.net/). On Windows startup I have many programs starting up automatically, which consists mainly of only reading lots of files, but still the system experienced freezing during startup. Also, I use Locate32 for finding files quickly, and once a day it scans all the folders on my computer - this consists only of reading the contents of lots of directories.
It was surprising that read-only operations caused freezing, even though it's only random write which has bad performance. When I looked at Filemon's output, there were anyhow lots of writes, but not to any particular files, but to directory meta-data. Then it came to my mind, that these were the updates to the files' last access timestamps. Some googling helped on how to disable last access timestamp updates under Windows. (Under Linux you can do the same by adding "noatime" to the mount options in /etc/fstab.)
Disabling the last access timestamp updates solved the rest of my problems. Now I experience freezing only when for example unpacking a big ZIP with lots of small files to the SSD (for example unzipping JDK documentation - some 12500 small files in 265MB). Under normal daily use I don't have any problems.
The timestamp trick was posted in the thread of fixes for XP... and in the long discussion on SSD.
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If spending money to enhance performance is your game (and who's game is it not?), you can do a lot better for pretty reasonable prices by choosing 10,000 or 15,000 RPM drives. The Western Digital Velociraptor is a 300 GB SATA II 10,000 RPM drive that you can get for a few hundred dollars (there's a 150 GB version, too, but it's much more expensive per GB). Get one. If you want 15,000 RPM drives, then you need to use SCSI, as far as I can tell. I have two of them on an SCSI Ultra-320 bus.
I do look forward with great anticipation to the perfection of the solid-state DASD.
Randall Schulz
Actually if spending money is the name of the game, then fusionio's ioDrive and ioDrive Duo are the best options. ioDrive costs about $2400 for the 80GB version and it is also possible to RAID bunches of them. The pricing for ioDrive Duo is not available yet AFAIK.
However at the moment I am also thinking about buying either an Intel X-25M SSDs or one of the newly released 256GB Samsung SSDs.
Anyway, have you compared the performance difference of your 2X RAID-0 HDDs with single-drive 7200RPM drives? How do their compile-deploy-run timings compare for J2EE projects?
Cheers,
Behrang
I have no experience with RAID. And I'm considering only development, not deployment. I suspect the factors governing performance are at least somewhat different.
And as far as the bit about "spending money," I didn't mean the goal was to spend as much as possible, but rather to balance price with performance gain. I can afford fast, high-capacity disk drives. I cannot afford Fusion-io's products now nor for the foreseeable future. As I said, I await with great anticipation these devices being perfected and their prices reaching levels comparable with rotating magnetic media. Disk drives need to go the way of the CRT, those being my two most disfavored technologies in computing. (Next on the hit list: cables!)
Randall Schulz
i am using a OCZ vertex (120gb), and probably because of it's 64 mb cache, it ROCKS. compilation itself is not *that* much faster, about 50% measured by my sense of time (maybe vista caches a lot so the difference is only noticable the first time i recompile everything) than on my average hdd, but the response times are much shorter. starting idea got 2-3 times faster, call hierarchy, find symbol, the auto-make when starting a java program and so on are boosted by factors.