Brennan’s Blog

I have seen a few blog entries related to boosting performance while using Visual Studio recently. The newest entry is by Scott Guthrie. He makes a similar point so what I suggested last year. The hard drive speed is very important. However, I would like to point out some additional details to augment what Scott is suggesting.

Disk Speed and Cache Size

As Scott points out laptops typically have 5400rpm speed hard drives, even the high end laptops. This is slow so Scott suggests upgrading to a 7200rpm speed drive. That is a good start, but you should also keep an eye on the cache size. Older drives have 1mb or 2mb of cache. Now you can get drives with 8mb and 16mb caches which will speed up the performance of the drive. The difference is like moving to a new apartment using a Honda Civic versus a large moving truck. Carrying larger loads with each trip will obviously cut down on the number of expensive trips.

External Drives and FireWire

I use external drive enclosures that you can get for around $40. They are empty shells that hold standard hard drives. You can choose from USB, FireWire or combination enclosures to connect them to your computer. I like the flexibility this provides. If you have the option, use the FireWire connection because it is designed for sustaining high data transfers over time. That will be important if you are watching media off the disk, running a long database query or running virtual machines. (FireWire vs USB: 1, 2)

The question of performance over a USB or FireWire connection versus an internal drive is something I have not researched. My theory is that I/O delays are significantly greater while physically spinning the disk to position the head to read and write data versus any delays from communicating over USB or FireWire because there are no moving parts over the wire. With the bottleneck being the drive itself, and not the link to it, I have leaned toward making sure I use the fastest drive available.

Defragging

Over time you will notice your computer gets slower. The most likely cause is disk fragmentation which is accelerated on a developer's machine due to the frequent file creation and disk writes. It is best to schedule regular defragging. On each computer I use I create a file called defrag.cmd and schedule it to run a few times during the week when I will not be using the computer. And I do it for every drive on the computer. Typically I have a drive for the operating system, C: and another for the data, D:. The script simply contains the following command.

defrag C:

The one catch is that you need to ensure you have enough space for the defragging process to work. Run the command occasionally to ensure you do have enough space. At the end of the script put a pause command to help you see any error or warning messages from running the script. And when you run this on Vista, you will need to right-click on the script and run it as the Administrator.

USB Flash Drives

The other question in my mind is what if I used a USB Flash Drive instead of a traditional hard drive to hold my development projects. I know a developer who does this so he can take his work home every night. I tried to find the disk speeds to compare a traditional drive to a flash drive but did not see anything that pointed out the difference clearly. I will have to run a benchmark later and post the results. I tend to think the USB Flash Drive would perform very well because it has no moving parts. To test this properly I need to ensure I get a high speed flash drive and not a cheaper drive with a slower access speed. I find this option appealing. Unfortunately Virtual PC does not show USB devices which means this will not be an option. But at least I could use SyncToy
to quickly keep a thumb drive up to date with files in my Virtual PC.

Ultimately it would be great to use a lightweight version of Visual Studio that can run a functional development environment from a thumb drive. If they can get the .NET runtime to be so small for the MacOS X installation I gotta believe that something similar could be done to get Visual Studio to run on a 2GB or 4GB flash drive. Imagine not having to wait through another Visual Studio installation that lasts hours. Instead you just order a flash drive from Microsoft with all of the development tools you would ever want on a simple thumb drive. Perhaps the Visual Studio team could add this idea to their To Do list for VS2010.