30 Oct
2011
30 Oct
'11
9:32 a.m.
On Sun, 30 Oct 2011, Toby Thain wrote:
Wouldn't make much difference to me. Because, at
least when I do it, my
activities are:
1) A *lot* of thinking
2) A little bit of typing
and
3) Stuff-all else that taxes a machine (the most demanding thing would be a
web browser and occasional unit test runs).
Are there common things that a programmer waits for?
Grepping the source tree. If I substantially change the behavior of
function X, I need to be sure it won't break any of the (often hundreds
of) call sites. Enough RAM to fit the entire source tree in the cache is
very helpful for this, and that can mean several GB...
Also, in the past several places I've worked the developer machine has a
mini version of the entire production enviromnent on it, so that one can
actually run meaningful tests. For me that currently means an apache
instance with about a dozen virtual hosts, memcached, half a dozen mysqld
instances, several processes doing background jobs, and 4 or 5 postfix
instances.
Alexey