Yesterday I replaced our old build machine (the dedicated machine that creates the builds and setups for our partners and products) with a new one. The old one was, well, old. The new one has two processors on board, 4Gb memory and a fast harddisk.
The build time of our largest product (>100Mb in setup, with a lot of files and documentation) took 55 minutes to build on the old machine and a mere 4 minutes on the new one.
I actually decided to start developing on that build machine using a Remote Terminal session and that has changed the experience of programming quite a bit. A recompile of a product takes an average of 2 minutes on my own computer (depening on the number of sources that has changed since the last compile of course). Recompiling the complete product on the new sever takes 11 seconds. That actually changes the experiencing of programming. I'll let the compiler do more work (e.g. check syntax) than before.
I can recommend investing in good hardware to anybody; it's money well worth spent.
Bye,
Bart
Friday, March 14, 2008
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2 comments:
The newest machines handle Delphi in a way that even the previous version simply isn't capable of. Being able to toss 2 or more gigs of ram at the Delphi IDE makes different.
I have to do work on an older (p4 2.8ghz 2gb) machine from time to time and the difference is ASTONISHING. How did I ever manage?!
For about 1000 dollars now adays and you can have a nice dual core machine with 8gb of ram. Toss on 64 bit version of Vista and you'll wonder why you ever coded any other way.
Of course, the next machines will make these look prehistoric as well making us all wonder how we ever got ANYTHING done at all on 486sx machines running Win95 in 4mb of ram on 200 mb harddrives with 2x cd drives (if you were lucky).
I could not help finding it a bit entertaining how you list your own title as "CTO", and it has taken you this long to apply that Chief Technologist ability to improving your own situation through a simple hardware upgrade. I can understand that cost could be an issue though.
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