Re: what kind of computer for programmer ?

Willem wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> ) This depends on the system. The last time I did this the machine had
> ) enough memory to disk-cache the intermediate files - but the operating
> ) system didn't do this well. So, overall a ramdisk was faster.
>
> If you use a ramdisk, the files never have to be written to disk at all,
> even with a write-caching FS the intermediates will still be written out
> after X seconds, degrading performance.

Exactly. The problem is the disk cache tends to start writing back
during the compile.

I did a small test:
The machine I'm sitting in front of is a 2.4GHz Intel Xeon with 1GB of
RAM and a ATA-100 hard-disk. I'm compiling a ~16Kloc C and C++ program
I maintain with Microsoft Visual C++ v6. For the purpose of this test
I rebuilt all the files, including the header-cache file. From the
local disk this took 9 seconds, from a ramdisk (using AR soft ramdisk)
it took 3 seconds.

For compiling only a few files the ram-disk is not likely to be any
quicker.

I think the difference is also less on the free-unices with GNU tools.

.

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