Prev – The “eureka” moment – discovery of RAM Disk Drives

Now there was no stopping, I did not need an SSD, all I had to do was install the RAM drive on our actual Jenkins windows machine, point SAS temporary data set creation to tmpfs and get rid of all the database IO issues and bring the build time on the Jenkins machine from 1+ hour to 25/30 minutes. Ajay allotted more RAM to both the Jenkins and the SAS Linux VMs. I did the needful and triggered the build process and to my astonishment, the build timings did not reduce much on our actual Jenkins and SAS Linux machines. I thought I did not do something right. I reconfirmed the changes on both the machines, re triggered the build and the result was same. I was completely shocked and disappointed. Though it was supposed to work, my hypothesis had failed and I was wondering why. The only reason I could imagine for the hypothesis to not work was that probably the SAS data set operations and the MySQL database operations that we were performing via tests were not as IO intensive as I had assumed earlier and there was something else in play. This was my new hypothesis.

Next – Test on smaller data set