Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance
Scott Guthrie has just posted a post on how to increase the performance of Visual Studio. (The title of this post is actually his) He has posted several blog posts on how to improve the performance of Visual Studio here and here. .NET tip of the day also has a couple of posts on VS performance here and here. In his latest post he points out the importance of the speed of the hard drive.
Despite spending most of my time in Visual Studio I've had my fair share optimizing databases. When monitoring databases for perf problems you try to find which if any of the subsystems cause bottlenecks. Is the server CPU bound, disk bound etc.
Turns out some skills transfer well to other environments. :-) I am doing my development on a notebook. (A hefty one. One that can compete if not outperform most desktops) Despite having a powerful machine it seemed to disk bound. eg. the hard drive subsystem is the main bottleneck and the other sub systems are under utilized waiting for IO completion. I was already running with a 100GB 7200 rpm Hitachi 2.5" drive and I wasn't sure what I could do. I won't upgrade this machine until late 2008 which is when I estimate the next substantial hardware upgrade will be available. After a short monitoring session my suspicion was confirmed. I'm wasting time waiting for IO. Since this is a notebook I can't set up a RAID configuration or throw in a 10K rpm drive.
A few months ago Hitachi released a new 200GB 7200 rpm disk. So what would that buy you you might ask. A lot! Hard drive performance isn't only dependent on the platter rotation speed, but also on the density of the data on the platters. The denser (can you say that?) the data the more data is read/written per rotation.
I ran out and got the 200GB version and I can just say that the performance increase is substantial. Hitachi claims close to 20% performance increase, but I haven't done any benchmarks. My gut feeling is that it's less, but that might be because of other factors as well.