2009-11-24

The 600 Euro upgrade that cut build times in half

In the past, I have talked here and here about my test environment for Veturanto. Today I'll talk about my development environment instead.

My main workstation used to have the following hardware configuration:

• Intel Core 2 Duo (dual core) @ 1.86 Ghz
• 4 GB DDR2 RAM
  
• Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB @ 10000 RPM

Decent, but not the absolute latest.

About two and a half months ago, a worthy successor of the Core 2 Duo arrived on the market: the Intel Core i5. By that time, Intel had also released the second generation of its high-performance SSDs. It was time for an upgrade.

I decided to take the plunge and invested about 600 Euro in the following hardware:

• Intel Core i5 750 (quad core) @ 3.01 Ghz (overclocked from 2.67 Ghz)
• Scythe Ninja 2 Cooler (yes, I do share Jeff Atwood's giant heatsink fettish)
• Asus P7P55D Pro motherboard
  
• 8 GB DDR3 RAM
• Intel Postville 34nm SSD 80 GB

But what kind of performance do you get out of this?

Let's compare two day to day activities: the full build and the application startup times.

Here is how they fared:

	Core 2 Duo + Raptor	Core i5 + SSD
Full build	1 minute 50 seconds	45 seconds
Application startup	17 seconds	5 seconds

The difference is nothing short of phenomenal !

Go out, get a modern processor and a high-performance SSD and you'll never look back !

 

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About Axel Fontaine

Axel Fontaine is the founder and CEO of Boxfuse the easiest way to deploy JVM and Node.js applications to AWS.

Axel is also the creator and project lead of Flyway, the open-source tool that makes database migration easy.

He is a Continuous Delivery and Immutable Infrastructure expert, a Java Champion, a JavaOne Rockstar and a regular speaker at many large international conferences including JavaOne, Devoxx, Jfokus, JavaZone, QCon, JAX, ...

You can follow him on Twitter at @axelfontaine