How to speed up your clojure build by 10x with boot and ramdisk --------------------------------------------------------------- For those us who do not fancy forking and patching clojure with CLJ-703, CLJ-322 and other compilation improvement patches for building your own projects, which are becoming a aot compilation slug, here is a trick to speed up the compilation many folds. I have seen a speed up of 11x in a moderately size project of my own. The basic idea is to make all intermediate build files go to a disk space create on ram. This setup is for boot. boot is awesome! Go get from http://boot-clj.com/ A few words about boot first. So boot is this new powerful build tooling for clojure which has concepts of immutable file sets. In simple words it compiles files to a temporary location before actually writing them to the target path. This is perfect for the ramdisk setup we are going to try. First (and last) lets set up a moderately size ramdisk and make boot write the filesets to ramdisk. You may need sudo. mkdir -p /mnt/ramdisk mount -t tmpfs -o size=128m tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk mkdir -p /mnt/ramdisk/tmp rm -r ~/.boot/cache/tmp ln -s /mnt/ramdisk/tmp ~/.boot/cache/tmp You are done! Probably would need some more work to make this persist across restarts though.