dschmidt/ember-cli-ramdisk

Replaces your broccoli tmp/ folder w ram disk for faster builds (?) / minimal SSD thrashing

NOTE:

This addon isn't as useful as it use to be. See the Impact section below.

ember-cli-ramdisk

ember-cli addon that mounts your broccoli tmp folder in RAM for speedier builds.

Presently only supports OS X (Darwin) and Linux.

Installation

From your ember-cli project folder:

npm install ember-cli-ramdisk --save-dev

Motivation

ember-cli uses Broccoli as a build tool, and Broccoli uses a tmp folder in your project's directory for storing intermediate files during the build process, which means they are getting stored on your hard drive.

Most operating systems allow you to mount file systems into memory, which results in faster read/write operations with the obvious tradeoff being that if your computer restarts, you'll lose any data mounted on the ramdisk.

But for temporary folders that are often read/written into, you can get some performance gains by mounting them to a ramdisk, which is what this ember addon does.

Impact

At this point, if you're using an up-to-date version of ember-cli, you probably won't notice an improvement in build times from this addon.

Another use case for this addon is to prevent things like:

• SSD thrash,
• slow writes to magnetic drives
• fragmenting on Copy-On-Write filesystems like btrfs - see (http://blog.ieugen.ro/2015/03/my-experience-with-btrfs-on-debian.html)

Details

This addon will:

1. Mount a ramdisk at

• OS X - /Volumes/EmberCliRamdisk
• Linux - /mnt/EmberCliRamdisk

2. Replace your project's tmp folder with a symlink to /Volumes/EmberCliRamdisk/your-project-name or /mnt/EmberCliRamdisk/your-project-name

Multiple projects can use this addon and share the same ramdisk.

The ramdisk does not automatically unmount after you kill broccoli, but can easily be unmounted from the side menu in Finder.

To unmount the ramdisk in linux you must run sudo umount /mnt/EmberCliRamdisk and sudo rm -R /mnt/EmberCliRamdisk/.

TODO

1. Tests
2. Support for OSs other than Mac (darwin) and Linux
3. Replace execSync with something nicer (can't right now since include doesn't wait for any returned promises)