We collect the project on a RAM disk using Maven

Over 10 years of developing web applications using Java technologies, I managed to see a huge number of fellow programmers and get acquainted with their methods of organizing a workflow. And, to my surprise, an absolute minority has ever thought about using a RAM disk to build projects. I think that such an elementary optimization just does not occur to me, constantly busy with current tasks, deadlines and simply life problems.

Meanwhile, the memory assembly has two very significant advantages:

• A significant increase in assembly speed due to the lack of input / output operations on the hard drive (this is more true for classic hard drives, especially with a rotation speed of 5400 rpm)
• Increase the lifetime of your SSD by moving intensive write operations to memory

Considering that in recent years the amount of RAM on the computer of an average developer has grown significantly and SSDs are beginning to be used everywhere, there are practically no arguments against.

The main goal of this short article is to provoke the thought: “But really! And how had I not thought about this before? ”

I will describe an example implementation of this approach in Linux. Actions on other operating systems will be almost identical, with the exception of the methods for creating the RAM disk itself.

RAM disk creation

Edit the / etc / fstab file with your favorite editor, for example:

gksudo -k gedit /etc/fstab

Add to it the term

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs mode=1777 0 0

I prefer to mount the / tmp folder on the RAM disk and collect all the projects in it, this gives an additional advantage - temporary files of other programs also do not use the SSD disk. An additional joyful fact is that all garbage is deleted automatically when the computer is restarted.

Maven setup

First you need to enter an additional parameter in the root pom-file of the project, which will point to the assembly folder and aim it at the default assembly folder. This is done so that the changes you need do not affect other developers.

...
    ${basedir}/target
...
    ${target.directory}
        ...
    
...

You should also pay attention to other places in the project pom-files that can use $ {basedir} / target.

For example on
The last step remains - changing the local Maven settings so that the variable $ {target.directory} has the value you need, and not the value specified in the pom file.

Copy the Maven configuration file to ~ / .m2 (if necessary)

cp /usr/share/maven/conf/settings.xml ~/.m2/settings.xml

Edit settings.xml in the ".m2" folder of the current user

gedit ~/.m2/settings.xml

Create a new profile

...
    RAMBuild/tmp/maven/${project.groupId}.${project.artifactId}/target
...

Add a new profile to the list of active:

    ....
    RAMBuild
    ....

That's all. I hope that now your builds will be faster and the disks will be more durable.