This is my 1 cent tip for speeding up building projects using Ramdisk.
Steps
1. Add more RAM modules to your MacBook (up to 8GB)
2. Make a temporary ramdisk(1GB in size) using the following command:
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “ramdisk” `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://2097152`
3. Now, the ramdisk is setup in /Volumes/ramdisk. Check it with ‘mount’ command.
/dev/disk1 on /Volumes/ramdisk (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners, mounted by USER)
4. Change the build path in Xcode: File -> Project Settings. Set ‘/Volumes/ramdisk’.
5. All done.
Benchmark Test: You can compare the speed of both ramdisk and HDD with a write test.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/xxx bs=8k count=100000 (this took 1.8secs in Macbook 2.26GHz)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/ramdisk/xxx bs=8k count=100000 (this took 18secs in Macbook 2.26GHz)
Notice: Unmount the ramdisk.
hdiutil detach /dev/disk1
