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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

#21

Post by photon_off »

Groxx wrote: post #14
photon_off wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Little things certainly matter, but only a little. In my experience, the most limiting factor in productivity is motivation and being healthy. These things are orders of magnitude more beneficial, and rarely effected by, my machine's speed. For the work I do (web development), the bottlenecks are very rarely the machine itself. At worst, I need to restart Firefox once a day, which make take up to a minute as I eat a banana.

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

#22

Post by dkarl »

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…

My Windows XP box is pretty much dead at this point. I wonder sometimes what I could do to improve its performance if I actually knew jack shit about Windows, but I'm not that interested. I'll just back up my files and have IT reflash it. I get paid to program Linux boxes, and I'm sure as hell not going to pick up Windows as a hobby.

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

#23

Post by barrkel »

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.

Compile times for the tree I work on range between around 40 minutes (the build VMs at work) and 7 minutes (locally, X-25 SSD, overclocked i7 920, 12GB RAM etc.) There's a huge difference between those two; and even more, my machine is almost perfectly responsive while I'm building.

The things like ad-hoc log file analysis. The compiler I work with can spit out colossal amounts of logs depending on the settings. A bash pipeline is naturally parallelized, and being able to do grep / sed / sort / uniq etc. rollups over the data in say 4 seconds versus 12 or 20 seconds greatly reduces the chances of breaking flow. A 4 second wait doesn't really tempt you to context switch to another window. 20 or 30 seconds does.

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

#24

Post by munchhausen »

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…

> Ya know what helps a lot? Reinstalling the OS.

I know that you went on to talk about OSX and Windows, but you did say OS, so I thought I'll drop by and mention that reinstalling Linux will not give you a performance improvement.

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

#25

Post by hristov »

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…

Or you can just install Linux. Probably not as pretty as OSX, but fast as hell.

After running Linux for more than 5 years now, I have never felt my system "age." I.e., it may become slower than newer computers but it never becomes slower than it used to be.

Of course I do kernel updates from time to time, but those keep all my local data and applications in place, so they are not like reinstalling the OS for Windows or OSX.

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

#26

Post by kscaldef »

alabut wrote: post #9

" But it's probably not the processor that accounts for most of the speed increase I've seen in my machine. The main help, I think, comes from the hard drive. " He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go from barely usable for desi…

Not to knock the SSD, but I actually don't understand why it should help significantly in the use case that the author was primarily talking about: large numbers of tabs open in your browser. My instinct there would be that more and faster RAM, and then to a lesser extent CPU cycles would be what's important. Unless it turns out that you've got so many tabs open, and you're cycling through them enough that you're going to swap and your swap partition is on the SSD. But then, again, it seems like more RAM is at least as good a solution as an SSD.

Can someone explain to me why an SSD should be a big win for web browsing?

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

#27

Post by defdac »

What I find interesting is that the best programmers among my friends usually have very outdated systems. They can do anything with a computer and can afford top of the line stuff, and still have over 5 year old hardware.

I was like that too and then got a fairly high end laptop with a fast 7200 rpm harddrive and 4 gigs of RAM which made the concept of "swaptime" when booting up my programming environment or compiling or doing both programming, music and graphics - a mere memory.

I've never been more creative.

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

#28

Post by nuriaion »

kscaldef wrote: post #26
alabut wrote: post #9

" But it's probably not the processor that accounts for most of the speed increase I've seen in my machine. The main help, I think, comes from the hard drive. " He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go from barely usable for desi…

Not to knock the SSD, but I actually don't understand why it should help significantly in the use case that the author was primarily talking about: large numbers of tabs open in your browser. My instinct there would be that more and faster RAM, and then to a lesser extent CPU cycles would be what's important. Unless it turns out that you've got so many tabs open, and you're cycling through them enough that you're goi…

In my experience the browser still saves/load a lot from the Harddisk. (OS X with 4GB RAM, YMMV) So a SSD also helps when i'm only using the browser with many tabs.

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

#29

Post by chadaustin »

kscaldef wrote: post #26
alabut wrote: post #9

" But it's probably not the processor that accounts for most of the speed increase I've seen in my machine. The main help, I think, comes from the hard drive. " He's totally right about using an SSD as the boot disk, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes, more than RAM, CPU or anything else. I've been using one for a while and it made my secondhand 3-4 year old macbook pro go from barely usable for desi…

Not to knock the SSD, but I actually don't understand why it should help significantly in the use case that the author was primarily talking about: large numbers of tabs open in your browser. My instinct there would be that more and faster RAM, and then to a lesser extent CPU cycles would be what's important. Unless it turns out that you've got so many tabs open, and you're cycling through them enough that you're goi…

Conventional drive: on the order of 800 IO ops per second.

Good SSD: on the order of 20,000 IO ops per second.

Now consider a hard page fault or disk access (browser cache, whatever) and reverse the above numbers:

Conventional drive: ~1 ms / disk access

Good SSD: 50 microseconds / disk access

That adds up quickly.

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

#30

Post by prodigal_erik »

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.

Even when all my Java is already compiled, Eclipse routinely locks up for seconds at a time as it's "helping" me. I've worked in the same place for a few years, and the IT guy recently told me my laptop is part of the oldest batch in the entire company.
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