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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

#31

Post by heresy »

defdac wrote: post #27

What I find interesting is that the best programmers among my friends usually have very outdated systems.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 compilin…

My 3 year old MacBook Pro with an SSD runs circles around my girlfriend's 2 month old version with a 7200 RPM drive.

Ditch the 7200RPM, get an SSD.

It is that big a difference.

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

#32

Post by stoney »

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.

I think the productivity increase is more than the time saved waiting for stuff to load. That few seconds pause can be enough to interrupt my flow, at which point I think, 'hmmm, let's check out HN while I wait for that'. Of course, by the time whatever I was waiting for is done I'm deep into an interesting thread about how a faster computer will change my life...

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

#33

Post by acqq »

mkramlich wrote: post #16

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. :)

Even worse, the author claims that faster work with 200 opened tabs changed his life. How?

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

#34

Post by dingle_thunk »

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.

The VMS are a big part of it. I can just go nuts on stuff because I can roll-back and/or fork entire operating systems easily. Of course, there's also things like compile time and flow interruption - but really, the VMs just let me experiment so much bettter.

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

#35

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

The SSD in the machine will probably need to be replaced.

Why? Here's an article estimating a 50 year lifetime for current SSDs based on writing at max speed 24x7, and claiming that the "it will wear out quickly" myth no longer applies.

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

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

#36

Post by th0ma5 »

defdac wrote: post #27

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 compilin…

i don't think i've ever ran out of ideas of things i wanted to do with a machine. i still have Commodore 64's Gary Kitchen's Game Maker project ideas, and i haven't messed with that in 20 years... i've always been on the software side of things perhaps, and besides doing too many different kinds of things at once which really require different, dedicated machines, i don't think i've ever used a machine to its fullest potential

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

#37

Post by rphlx »

barrkel wrote: post #19
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.

Maybe they optimize for latency because NTFS still fragments really badly.
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