I configured a RAM disk on a Virtual PC running ArcGIS Desktop 10 and set my HKCU\Software\ESRI\Output\TempPath to a directory on the RAM disk. It’s hard to perceive any sort improvement with that sort of configuration and I’m curious to know if anyone else has done this on a non-virtual computer and what the results were.
Anecdotal answers are fine.
Also, putting the cache path on a ram disk is probably not a good idea, but is anyone doing this anyway? (HKCU\Software\ESRI\Desktop10.0\Settings\Cache Path)
Best Answer
One of my former workmates set up a long-running GIS computation process such that it saved intermediate results on a RAM disk. Both he and his boss claimed that there was a very significant speed-up of the computation process, and computation time was quite critical in their project.
I personally couldn't quite figure out why the RAM disk was needed at all. If they had just kept the intermediate results in memory (as regular, non-persisted objects) instead of "writing" them to a (RAM) disk, that would have made absolutely no difference in my opinion.
But I suppose there could be potential cases where the API would force you to persist objects before you can process them further (e.g. because a particular computation expects a filename as its input). In such cases, I imagine that a RAM disk (being a workaround to prevent real harddisk I/O) might help.