Faster builds with Core 2 Duo

Harald Walker — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:53:52 +0000

Two days ago a developer of our team checked some changes in and broke the build. When asked why he didn’t first run the test locally, he replied that it takes too long and wondered why else do we have an automatic build system.

Build speed matters as you see and it was one reason for me to buy a new MacBook Pro to replace my 2 year old PowerBook, which just became too slow for software development as well as other common tasks.

So, today I ran a small unscientific competition between my two systems on our current project, which uses Maven 2 to build and a Oracle 10g database. To reduce dependency on the network connection to the database server (via VPN), I installed a local Oracle 10g Express on separate machine. Later I will try to install the same on a VM.

With maven I ran a clean installation including all tests a couple of times, also to make sure all dependencies have been resolved.

The PowerBook (1.67Ghz G4, 1.5MB RAM, 100Mbit connection) needs on average 7 minutes (it took more than 20 minutes with the VPN connection!). The new MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, WLAN connection) finishes the same task in 3 1/2 minutes, which is an acceptable speed. Just run your tests when you get a fresh cup of coffee (you should not sit behind the desk without a break anyhow).

It is also nice, that Eclipse 3.x with MyEclipse and some other plug-ins starts 14 seconds faster on the MacBook Pro.

Considering the costs of development hours, esp. if bugs are not caught on time because skipped testing, I think it is foolish to save money on hardware for software developers. Give them the best and fastest you can get. It will not only motivate them (we love good technology) but also improve productivity and probably quality as well.

Bookmark It

Installing a Mac OS X home-server – day 3

Harald Walker — Sat, 27 May 2006 23:34:28 +0000

I am still busy with file storage. Undecided between an external hard disk case for one of the old disks and a new external hard disk I came home today with a 500 GB LaCie Big Disk. I went to 3 stores in town but I has been impossible to get a good external case with USB2 and Firewire and also the new LaCie only has USB 2.0. I will use this disk for the media archive, where a few bytes more or less per second are less important. I will use the fast FW800 disk for the digital images (growing fast in size!), documents and other regular data. This way, no sensitive data is on the old internal notebook disk of the PowerBook. The 400 GB disk which I will soon get out of the LinkStation should be enough for regular backups of email, sql databases and and everything else (except for the media archive). So in total I will now have more than one terabyte of disk space in the server. Hard too believe, that just 10 years ago I hardly had 100 MB, but on the other hand with HD video, megapixel images, digital music downloads (netlabels, emusic,…) etc. the demand grows fast and prices are falling constantly.

Update [2007]:
The old internal hard disk of the PowerBook died in December 2006. I noticed it early enough and was able to rescue the data and replace it with a new and larger disk. For a notebook of that age it had to happen sooner or later.
The LaCie Big Disk has been a disappointment. In contrast to my external Firewire disk it does not spin down when it is not being used for a while and since the cooling of the enclosure is not very effective, the disk tends to heat up quiet a bit in the summer.

Bookmark It

bitwalker.nl » hardware

Faster builds with Core 2 Duo

Installing a Mac OS X home-server – day 3