RAM drive for compiling - is there such a thing?

Question

An answer (see below) to one of the questions right here on Stack Overflow gave me an idea for a great little piece of software that could be in

Answer 1

Your OS will cache things in memory as it works. A RAM disk might seem faster, but that's because you aren't factoring in the "copy to RAMDisk" and "copy from RAMDisk" times. Dedicating RAM to a fixed size ramdisk just reduces the memory available for caching. The OS knows better what needs to be in RAM.