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Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

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Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#131

Post by xp84 »

whalesalad wrote: post #42
ghaff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes you only use one laptop. I have a couple 2015 Macs that are very useful for browser tasks. They’re not paperweights and I use them daily.

I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is…

> should donate

Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs.

Given probably 80% of people probably use webapps for nearly everything, there's a huge amount of life left in a late-stage Intel Mac for people who will never engage in the types of tasks I used to find sluggish on my 2015 (very large Excel sheet calculations and various kinds of frontend code transpilation). Heck, even that stuff ran amazingly better on my 16" 2019 Intel MBP, so I'd assume for web browsing your old Macs will be amazing for someone in need, assuming they don't have bad keyboards.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#132

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #64

This is a great write-up and I love all the different ways they collected and analyzed data. That said, it would have been much easier and more accurate to simply put each laptop side by side and run some timed compilations on the exact same scenarios: A full build, incremental build of a recent change set, incremental build impacting a module that must be rebuilt, and a couple more scenarios. Or write a script that…

[deleted]

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#133

Post by hmottestad »

WaxProlix wrote: post #109
LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

I suspect things like GitHub's Codespaces offering will be more and more popular as time goes on for this kind of thing. Did you guys try out some of the AWS Cloud9 or other 'canned' dev env offerings?

My experience with GitHub Codespaces is mostly limited to when I forgot my laptop and had to work from my iPad. It was a horrible experience, mostly because Codespaces didn’t support touch or Safari very well and I also couldn’t use IntelliJ which I’m more familiar with.

Can’t really say anything for performance, but I don’t think it’ll beat my laptop unless maven can magically take decent advantage of 32 cores (which I unfortunately know it can’t).

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#134

Post by chiefalchemist »

mdbauman wrote: post #103
jiggawatts wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/1205/

This xkcd seems relevant also: https://xkcd.com/303/ One thing that jumps out at me is the assumption that compile time implies wasted time. The linked Martin Fowler article provides justification for this, saying that longer feedback loops provide an opportunity to get distracted or leave a flow state while ex. checking email or getting coffee. The thing is, you don't have to go work on a completely unrelated task.…

Spot on. The mind often needs time and space to breathe, especially after it's been focused and bearing down on something. We're humans, not machines. Creativity (i.e., problem solving) needs to be nurtured. It can't be force fed.

More time working doesn't translate to being more effective and more productive. If that were the case then why are a disproportionate percentage of my "Oh shit! I know what to do to solve that..." in the shower, on my morning run, etc.?

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#135

Post by rendaw »

> People with the M1 laptops are frequently waiting almost 2m for their builds to complete.

I don't see this at all... the peak for all 3 is at right under 20s. The long tail (i.e. infrequently) goes up to 2m, but for all 3. M2 looks slightly better than M1, but it's not clear to me there's an improvement from M2 to M3 at all from this data.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#136

Post by aranke »

lawrjone wrote: post #2

Author here, thanks for posting! Lots of stuff in this from profiling Go compilations, building a hot-reloader, using AI to analyse the build dataset, etc. We concluded that it was worth upgrading the M1s to an M3 Pro (the max didn’t make much of a difference in our tests) but the M2s are pretty close to the M3s, so not (for us) worth upgrading. Happy to answer any questions if people have them.

Hi,

Thanks for the detailed analysis. I’m wondering if you factored in the cost of engineering time invested in this analysis, and how that affects the payback time (if at all).

Thanks!

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#137

Post by rsanek »

LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

This might have to do with scale. At my employer (~7k employees) we started down this path a few years ago as well, and while it has taken longer for remote to be better than local, it now definitively is and has unlocked all kinds of other stuff that wasn't possible with the local-only version. One example is working across multiple branches by switching machines instead of files on local has meant way lower latency when switching between tasks.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#138

Post by vaxman »

whatshisface wrote: post #117
vaxman wrote: post #84

1. If, and only if, you are doing ML or multimedia, get a 128GB system and because of the cost of that RAM, it would be foolish not to go M3 Max SoC (notwithstanding the 192GB M2 Ultra SoC). Full Stop. (Note: This is also a good option for people with more money than brains.) 2. If you are doing traditional heavyweight software development, or are concerned with perception in an interview, promotional context or just…

Good to know I have commercial options for overcoming my laptop shame at interviews. /s

A freelancer might be interviewed by a client in Entertainment, Hospitality, Construction, Real Estate or Academia and if they show up with a pimped MBA, all their prospect is going to see is that this person asking for a chunk of cash is using the same ‘puter as their kid, so they lose pricing power or maybe the whole gig. Likewise, a dev might go for an interview with a bunch of Pentium heads who think you need a Razor laptop with RGB keys to be legit and they’re going to want to see at least a 16” form-factor as table stakes. There is some variation between those extremes for devs trapped in a corporate setting, but none of it based in reality, the perception is the reality.

Bottom line: M1-MBA16 (or M1-MBA8) for incremental builds, 16” M2P-MBP32 (or M1M-MBP64) for full development or 16” M3M-MBP128 (or M2U-MS192) for AI/media dev ..the other models aren’t really for devs.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#139

Post by FireBeyond »

boringuser2 wrote: post #95

I get a bit of a toxic vibe from a couple comments in that article. Chiefly, I think the problem is that the CTO solved the wrong problem: the right problem to solve includes a combination of assessing why company public opinion is generating mass movements of people wanting a new MacBook literally every year, if this is even worth responding to at all (it isn't), and keeping employees happy. Most employees are reaso…

Hah, yes. There's a balancing act, and investing in tools is important.

I also worked at a company whose CIO put out an email noting how "amazing" a coincidence it was just how many company iPhones got broken/water damaged/lost or stolen in the 2 months following a new iPhone announcement event.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#140

Post by edwinjm »

boringuser2 wrote: post #92
cedws wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's OK to just not like Apple. You don't have to justify your own feelings with pejoratives towards other peoples' choice of laptop.

You really need to learn what a"pejorative" is before using the term publicly.

"waste of money" is a pejorative. Go away.
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