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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

#321

Post by neya »

Last month I upgraded from an M1 Pro to an M3 Pro - 16GB RAM, 512 GB. Here is an honest review of my experience. The chassis of both the machines are exactly the same. The bad thing about that is the newer MacBooks come with a matte finish for the keyboard and the finish wears off like in just 3 weeks even with proper care. As a matter of fact, in the newer machine, I used ISP 70% with water to wipe it off after each use thinking it was due to grease/oil from the fingers. However the finish still wore off, suggesting that it has more to do with the finish itself.

With that out of the way, I maintain a very large site with over 50,000 posts in a static site setup. It is built on a Phoenix/Elixir setup I wrote from scratch and has been serving my client well without hiccups for the last 5 years. From time to time, some of the writers may mess up something and they would want us to run a sweep occasionally - back track to the last X number of posts and re-publish them. Usually about 100-500 posts which covers a few weeks/months worth of posts depending on the run.

So, for a 100 post sweep, the M3 pro was slightly faster, by an order of magnitude of over 1.5x. But, for other everyday tasks, like say opening Affinity Designer/Photo and editing files, I didn't notice much improvements. And Apple's website is notoriously deceptive about the improvements. Their graphs always showcase comparisons with a top specc'ed M3 machine with a base M1 variant or M2 which makes no sense to me as a developer. Disk (SSD) speeds were slightly slower on the M3 than on my old M1 variant. But, I am unable to attribute it to the processor as it could be a bad driver or software version. For those interested, it is one of those internal Samsung SSDs connected via a SATA-USBC converter.

Long story short, if you are on M2 - Not worth upgrading. If you are on an M1 or M1 Pro, you can still hold on to it a bit longer, the only reason you would want to upgrade is if you got a good deal like me. I sold my 21' M1 Pro for almost $1800 US (it still had Apple care) and got a student discount (I'm in the middle of some certification programs) on the new M3 Pro, so I got it. If I didn't have these financial incentives, probably wouldn't have been worth upgrading. Hope this helps someone.

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

#322

Post by wtallis »

gumballindie wrote: post #100
isthisreallife9 wrote: post #60

[flagged]

You need to be a little bit more gentle and understanding. A lot of folks have no idea there are alternatives to apple’s products that are faster, of higher quality, and upgradeable. Many seem to be blown away by stuff that has been available with other brands for a while - fast RAM speeds being one of them. Few years back when i broke free from apple i was shocked how fast and reliable other products were. Not to me…

> Many seem to be blown away by stuff that has been available with other brands for a while - fast RAM speeds being one of them.

What specifically is this bit referring to? Server CPUs with far more memory channels than consumer products, or GPUs with fast and wide memory interfaces but low memory capacity?

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

#323

Post by eysi »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #221
eysi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team has been developing against a fully remote environment (K8s cluster) for some years now and it makes for a really powerful DevEx. Code sits on our laptops but live syncs to the remote services without requiring a Docker build or K8s deploy. It really does feel like local. In particular it lets us do away with the commit-push-pray cycle because we can run integ tests and beyond as we code as opposed to waiting…

I tried Garden briefly but didn't like it for some reason. DevSpace was simpler to set up and works quite reliably. The sync feature where they automatically inject something into the pod works really well.

DevSpace is a great tool but it’s bummer you didn’t like Garden.

Admittedly, documentation and stability weren’t quite what we’d like and we’ve done a massive overhaul of the foundational pieces in the past 12 months.

If you want to share feedback I’m all ears, my email is in my profile.

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

#324

Post by wtallis »

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…

> and the much bigger systems like M3 Max will be slower (bc they need time to ramp up multiple cores and that’s not happening with bursty incremental builds)

Is there some microbenchmark that illustrates the problem, or is this just wild extrapolation from some deep misunderstanding (maybe a bad car analogy about turbo lag?)

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

#325

Post by andrekandre »

Tarball10 wrote: post #209

This is only tangentially related, but I'm curious how other companies typically balance their endpoint management and security software with developer productivity. The company I work for is now running 5+ background services on their developer laptops, both Mac and Windows. Endpoint management, priviledge escalation interception, TLS interception and inspection, anti-malware, and VPN clients. This combination heavi…

  > have other companies found better ways to provide this security without impacting developer productivity as much?
only way i've seen is if things get bad, report it to it/support and tell them what folder/files to exclude from inspection so your build temp files and stuff don't clog and slow up everything

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

#326

Post by coreyh14444 »

Companies spend billions of dollars building BI tools that can do analysis against a data warehouse and they just... exported a CSV and asked ChatGPT to analyze it. One of the biggest shifts you can imagine in terms of the value of pre-AI and post worlds.

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

#327

Post by PhilipRoman »

gizmo wrote: post #228
euos wrote: post #223

I am ex-core contributor Chromium and Node.js and current core contributor to gRPC Core/C++. I am never bothered with build times. There is "interactive build" (incremental builds I use to rerun related unit tests as I work on code) and non-interactive build (one I launch and go get coffee/read email). I have never seen hardware refresh toggle non-interactive into interactive. My personal hardware (that I use now and…

Somehow programmers have come to accept that a minuscule change in a single function that only result in a few bytes changing in a binary takes forever to compile and link. Compilation and linking should be basically instantaneous. So fast that you don't even realize there is a compilation step at all. Sure, release builds with whole program optimization and other fancy compiler techniques can take longer. That's fin…

This is the reason why I often use tcc compiler for my edit/compile/hotreload cycle, it is about 8x faster than gcc with -O0 and 20x faster than gcc with -O2.

With tcc the initial compilation of hostapd it takes about 0.7 seconds and incremental builds are roughly 50 milliseconds.

The only problem is that tcc's diagnostics aren't the best and sometimes there are mild compatibility issues (usually it is enough to tweak CFLAGS or add some macro definition)

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

#328

Post by arthens »

makeitdouble wrote: post #185
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.…

It of course steongly depends on what your stack is, my current job provides a full remote dev server for our backend and it's the best experience I've seen in a long time. In particular having a common DB is suprinsingly uneventful (nobody's dropping tables here and there) while helping a lot. We have interns coming in and fully ready within an hour or two of setup. Same way changing local machines is a breeze with…

> We have interns coming in and fully ready within an hour or two of setup. Same way changing local machines is a breeze with very little downtime.

This sounds like the result of a company investing in tooling, rather than something specific to a remote dev env. Our local dev env takes 3 commands and less than 3 hours to go from a new laptop to a fully working dev env.

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

#329

Post by hmottestad »

Tarball10 wrote: post #197
hmottestad wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!

Kind of a edge case, but we were attempting to migrate from Docker to Podman, and found running x86 container images in Podman Desktop on M-series Macs to be unacceptably slow. Docker Desktop supports Rosetta 2 virtualization which performs fine, but Podman Desktop does not.

Podman Desktop is free and open source right? You could implement Rosetta 2 support, or maybe pay them to implement it for you?

I shy away from x86 images too, even thought I use docker.

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