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A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

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Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#11

Post by gbhn »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #3

"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more." The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced. It would be nice to know how much ram he had in the new vs old ma…

Yes, I think for browser-heavy computing (the author mentioned opening hundreds of tabs) a ton of ram and a fast ssd cache are doing a a lot more than a fast cpu (and indeed, the author reports the cpu is usually operating at 1 or 2 %). CPUs today are so fast and cache-sensitive that hard drives basically amount to off-site backup. Unless you have a lot of ram, they'll just starve and idle in I/O for most end-user types of compute loads.

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#13

Post by Groxx »

Ya know what helps a lot?

Reinstalling the OS (edit: from scratch. ie, format the drive + install). I make a point to do so at least once per year. OSX has aged significantly more gracefully than Windows, despite having several times as many files (approached 3 million near the end), but a two-year-old install (I slacked) is nothing like a fresh one. Especially noticeable: Spotlight actually finds what I'm looking for in less than a second again (vs upwards of a minute or more).

It also highlights the differences between the OSes: OSX handles loads and loads of applications at the same time with significantly less slowdown and zero waiting on the UI. Windows launches and handles a single application much more quickly, but it's not uncommon to wait a significant amount of time for a single click to register if I launch a couple large ones at once. Just today I've had to sit for a couple minutes because a large compile+launch decided to happen at the same time as a browser crash and an application auto-updating. Win 7 utterly stopped responding, except for my mouse cursor's movement.

edit: to all repliers suggesting Linux: yes it does, if you consider reinstalling to be "reinstalling from scratch", which was what I had meant (though not stated, apologies). Every OS slows with extensions + libraries + millions of files + hundreds of compiled applications, and I'm likely a bit of an edge case anyway. I pretty easily install 1000+ applications per year for experimenting, many of which add extra cruft that no uninstaller removes completely.

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#14

Post by Groxx »

photon_off wrote: post #7
dingle_thunk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you will have a more accurate effect because most web servers are VMs. Also, the ability to do snapshots/rollbacks/clones should not be underestimated. Upgrading from a dell E630 (T8100 2GB) to an E6410 (i7 8GB) and buying a technet subscription has doubled my productivity as a web developer (not an exaggeration).

How does a much faster computer double your productivity? Other than booting up programs, I'm rarely blocked by my computer being slow. The development I do is mainly text editing with a browser to view results. I could see this being different if I had to wait for things to compile, though. But still, double is a pretty large claim.

How much time, focus, and motivation is lost due to slowdowns, though? Some days, they certainly seem to take rather large tolls.

The little things matter.

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#16

Post by mkramlich »

not a good use of money just so you can have 200 browser tabs open -- you can only look at one at a time anyway, for example. It's a bit like noticing your house is overflowing with a trash and deciding that the solution is to buy 50 large trash cans, placing several in each room of your house. rather than, you now, create less trash in the first place and/or take it out more frequently. :)

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#17

Post by mkramlich »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #3

"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more." The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced. It would be nice to know how much ram he had in the new vs old ma…

"Will I ever outgrow my speed demon of a computer? At this point it's hard for me to see how. Even at my peak usage, my processor never goes above 10 percent capacity, and most of the time I'm using just 1 or 2 percent. I'm confident this rig will last me at least five years, and probably more."

-- Bill Gates, 1985

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#18

Post by eliben »

What will help even more is becoming a bit more organized. Having 200 tabs open simultaneously sounds like a lot of lost effort to me. Learn to use bookmarks, history and especially the smart bookmark & history search available in the address bars of Firefox and Chrome, and you won't need to upgrade the PC just to support messiness.

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#19

Post by barrkel »

Groxx wrote: post #13

Ya know what helps a lot ? Reinstalling the OS (edit: from scratch. ie, format the drive + install). I make a point to do so at least once per year. OSX has aged significantly more gracefully than Windows, despite having several times as many files (approached 3 million near the end), but a two-year-old install (I slacked) is nothing like a fresh one. Especially noticeable: Spotlight actually finds what I'm looking f…

Windows has historically been pretty poor at handling concurrent I/O to the same device. I've seen circa 200M/sec sequential disk throughput fall to 10M/sec or so simply by trying to run another operation concurrently. The I/O scheduler seems heavily weighted for latency rather than throughput.

Re: A screaming-fast PC changed my life. It will change yours, too

#20

Post by barrkel »

dasil003 wrote: post #6

Processor is hardly worth paying for top of the line. I bought the new 15" MBP that was released this year with 2.4Ghz i5, and put 8GB plus an Intel X-25 SSD in there. Compared to my 2009 MBP w/ 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB and HDD, it's a bigger speed difference than I've ever gotten in any upgrade ever. Definitely worth paying 40x for the drive space. It's not that the top speed is faster... it's just that the beach ball…

You'll notice the difference in CPU power if you ever do any video transcoding. By my measurements, my i7 920 was around 3x faster than my Q6600.
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