JJB Blog » disk http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:47:01 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 How to use a RAM / memory disk for MySQL in Rails http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/09/29/how-to-use-a-ram-memory-disk-for-mysql-in-rails/ http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/09/29/how-to-use-a-ram-memory-disk-for-mysql-in-rails/#comments Sat, 29 Sep 2007 20:53:45 +0000 John http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/2007/09/29/how-to-use-a-ram-memory-disk-for-mysql-in-rails/ I wanted to use a RAM disk for my MySQL data files when running my tests for a Rails project. I succeeded, but it only cut 2 seconds off of my ~30 second test suite for my functional tests, and didn’t cut any time off of my unit tests. But nevertheless, here is how I achieved this, in case it is useful to others. All of this is on OS X, using MySQL 5 from Macports.

What we are doing is creating a RAM disk, and then creating a seperate MySQL instance that stores its data on that RAM disk.

[bash]
# Create the RAM disk
hdid -nomount ram://52428800
newfs_hfs /dev/disk1
mkdir /tmp/ramdisk1
mount -t hfs /dev/disk1 /tmp/ramdisk1

# Initialize the MySQL environment
mysql_install_db5 –datadir=/tmp/ramdisk1

# Start the MySQL server
/opt/local/libexec/mysqld –basedir=/opt/local –datadir=/tmp/ramdisk1 –pid-file=/tmp/mysql_memory_localhost.pid –port=10000 –socket=/tmp/mysql_memory.sock

# Create your test database
mysqladmin5 –socket=/tmp/mysql_memory.sock -uroot create projectname_test
[/bash]

Now in your database.yml file, add socket: /tmp/mysql_memory.sock to the test database configuration.

(thanks to this tutorial for how-to create a RAM disk in OS X)

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