Answer by vonbrand for Creating a ram disk on Linux

Linux is very efficient in using RAM. There is little surprise that you see little if any speedup with tmpfs. The largest pieces to read into memory (and thus able to slow the process down) are the tools (compiler, assembler, linker), and in a longish make they will be loaded into memory at startup and never leave it. What is left is reading in source (the writing out of the results won't slow you down, unless severely memory constrained). Again, comon header files will stay around, only the user's source will require reading. And that is unlikely to be more than a few megabytes. Creating a large RAMdisk (or even much use of tmpfs) can very well slow things down (by making the build memory constrained, the files on RAMdisk or on tmpfs can not be used directly from there).