Optimize your development environment and save your SSD at the same time
In a quest to tune IntelliJ one of the bits of advice I came across was to setup a ramdisk for build artifacts.
Note: this is specific to OSX but the same can be done on any linux environment
Master of the obvious: this is an ephemeral disk because its in memory and any contents will not survive a machine restart
The application I primarily work on runs on Tomcat, directly against the IDE build artifacts which are targeted under WEB-INF/classes. For this reason I also had to enable the allowLinking feature in my Tomcat Context.
Here are the steps I took for setting up my ramdisk:
Create a ram disk by using this script. Make sure you provision enough space for the current and future content you with to host on this drive.
Move the contents of your IDE output directory onto the new RAM Disk (i.e. /volumes/ramdisk)
Create a symlink to point to the new ramdisk directory
Make sure Tomcat is configured to follow symlinks inside your application context file: