Developing When Your Computer is too Fast • Hacker News Board

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#21

Post by qqqq2010 » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 5:04 AM UTC

radioactive21 wrote: post #13

Wouldn't all this depend on your target customers? If your target customer is big business that have fast computers you are okay. If your customers are average joes, then yes I would say you should have a test environment in place that closely represents those customers. Even after all that the question I have is which set of customers brings in the most money for you? Lets say you have a mix of big business that run…

Incidentally, as a webdev who targets big businesses, they in fact usually have -slow- computers. Javascript in IE 6 is pokey, and typical use-cases of Outlook and Excel don't need much firepower.

A joe-blow at home on the other hand is either at least at the "corporate" level, or even higher for gaming or media-centering.

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#22

Post by qq66 » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 5:06 AM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #7

I can see this work, but honestly wouldn't it make more sense not to use an older computer? They are typically cheap and you don't have to suffer when you don't develop speed critical code.

You wouldn't want to be compiling on an old machine.

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#23

Post by meemo » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 6:53 AM UTC

What about developing or testing in a virtual machine?

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#24

Post by emmelaich » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 7:29 AM UTC

I appreciate this sort of software, since our development and production hardware has vastly different performance profiles.

Development is on fast intel single or dual core machines with slow disks and production is slow many core sparc machines with fast disks.

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#25

Post by InclinedPlane » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 8:03 AM UTC

dlsspy wrote: post #10

chunkbot wrote: post #4

Fun, but the good thing about slow computers is that they're also the cheapest; it's far more economical to just buy an old box for a couple hundred dollars (or even cheaper).

Sure, but then I have to carry around another computer or two when I want to work within a particular assumption. Now, I can say, ``What if this box were really slow to respond to network requests 10% of the time?'' and just do it.

Carry around, repair, keep patched, etc. It's only cheap if your time is cheap.

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#26

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 8:31 AM UTC

whimsy wrote: post #16

StavrosK wrote: post #2

Great work, but I think a library to do the opposite would be more useful.

... to make your computer go faster than it really is? That WOULD be pretty useful. Or are you merely talking about libraries that do optimization for you?

The former!

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#27

Post by vlisivka » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 10:22 AM UTC

51Cards wrote: post #5

I have been programming since the late 80's and one thing I learned early was to always develop (or at least extensively test) on older hardware. My primary work machine is usually a generation or two old. At present I code on a T42 Thinkpad and there is a new T60 waiting to take over in a couple months. If you're forced to develop in a "slow" environment you learn to optimize your code from the get go, all the time.…

I also started programming in late 80's, and I use that technique too. Currently, my netbook is more powerful than my primary laptop. :-)

My laptop is also able to variate CPU clock speed from 2GHz to 200MHz. It makes me easy to execute CPU-bound benchmarks of my programs.

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#28

Post by kmfrk » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 11:22 AM UTC

baha_man wrote: post #20

jrockway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. Does HN say somewhere that "anything you submit can be used for commercial purposes by YC startups"?

Interesting point, I googled for 'who owns copyright blog comments' and found this (Google cache, the site itself is down): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6GfoIFr... I'd like to hear if anyone else agrees or disagrees with this article (it seems to be a bit of a grey area).

I think it was when talking to Jonathan from Plagiarism Today (http://www.plagiarismtoday.com) that I was told that forum posts should be regarded as the authors' own, legal copyright property. I may have some old notes on this around that I can dig up.

Some forums (and sites like YouTube) write some Terms of Use/EULAs to waive their content rights to the site owners (not for any nefarious reasons), although I doubt that these "agreements" hold up.

If I had any comments or forum posts that were copied verbatim in a manner that upset me, I would definitely pursue it legally. But I'm a fanatic like that.

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#29

Post by dugmartin » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 1:20 PM UTC

I recommend doing the same thing for web development.

There is a nice Firefox plugin (Firefox Throttle) that lets you throttle uploads and downloads with a single button click. If, like most web developers, you do development on localhost using the plugin lets you see how your user's experience uploading large files or downloading image rich pages with network latency.

Unfortunately its been pulled from the addons library search but you can download it directly (for now) using the ftp url in the comments here:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/755876#answer-107...

Re: Developing When Your Computer is too Fast

#30

Post by chunkbot » Sat, Nov 13, 2010, 4:42 PM UTC

dlsspy wrote: post #12

I don't believe I communicated clearly enough in the creation of this project. This is not ``Yay, I don't ever have to worry about any other computer because I can simulate anything.'' This is me sitting next to my QA guy (who really understands what I did better than I do so far) and having him say, ``Why don't you just make it fast for the first ten minutes, then slow down socket operations briefly, then switch a p…

I understand your motivations better now. Being able to run these ad hoc tests in a repeatable manner isn't the same as firing up IE6 on a Pentium 4 box with 256MB of RAM.