Worst Developers Machines
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I'm not sure I agree. Giving developers slow machines does not make them write fast code. In my experience developers have a knack for optimising for their most immediate pain points. A developer with a slow machine will optimise to write code faster rather than write fast code. You'll end up with an unmaintainable mess because creating multiple classes/files/folders was too painful. If you want them to write fast code, measure exactly what it is you want them to improve and identify targets. Benchmark your code and set acceptable performance goals in advance.
Simon
Well, I was being just a little bit sarcastic. Mind you, it would probably be better for everyone if games developers had their ankles shackled, so to speak.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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my laptop takes longer to boot, I did a race with my coffee machine (7 cups) and my laptop. The coffee machine won. it's an i5 with 3,4GB. (I didn't install it myself.)
V.
V. wrote:
my laptop takes longer to boot, I did a race with my coffee machine (7 cups) and my laptop. The coffee machine won.
I had the same problem with my latest; it was slower than my previous one, which had much lower specs. The trouble is that laptops in particular are loaded down with unwanted "security" and "monitoring" garbage programs from the hardware manufacturer. Try Soluto[^]. It's great at helping you choose which background cr@pware services you can do without. It managed to help me halve my boot-up time, and everything runs a lot smoother, now.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Well, I was being just a little bit sarcastic. Mind you, it would probably be better for everyone if games developers had their ankles shackled, so to speak.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Mark Wallace wrote:
Well, I was being just a little bit sarcastic.
Dontcha hate it when you have to explicitly state that. :)
"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.
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I think that developers should be issued nothing better than a Pentium 2. That way, when their product goes to market, instead of customers not being able to run it, because it requires the biggest, fastest computers, if it's to to crawl out of its box, it'll go like sh1t off a shovel. Result: Happier customers, and better-paid devs. Suck it in and use the worst one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Test machines: yes. Dev Machines: No. Devs time is to expensive.
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| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:
My home PC is Intel i7, 1.5GB of video ram on a GeForce whatever, 8GB Ram, 1TB disk, Blu-Ray, 24" widescreen. Work PC is nowhere near that but works great with VS2010 - I use 2 widescreens on it although really only code on one, the other is for whatever needs parking.
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I think that developers should be issued nothing better than a Pentium 2. That way, when their product goes to market, instead of customers not being able to run it, because it requires the biggest, fastest computers, if it's to to crawl out of its box, it'll go like sh1t off a shovel. Result: Happier customers, and better-paid devs. Suck it in and use the worst one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Mark Wallace wrote:
I think that developers should be issued nothing better than a Pentium 2.
Haha, I know what you're saying actually. I have the best dev system here (Core2 Quad with 4GB RAM and 64-bit Windows 7) because I develop the most demanding apps (tons of DSP, and so far a lot of it done on the main CPU). The first couple of times we had major releases of the software we used my machine as the minimum spec (I had a 2.4GHz P4 back then), just to be safe. Of course the software is sold as part of systems that cost $100,000 or more, so specifying a fast PC isn't exactly breaking the budget.
He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely, But thank you for your concern, Here's wishing you a Happy New Year." I wished him one back in return.
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Why not add more memory to it? It's almost free.
Wout
He keeps getting promised it but it never seems to happen. TBH it was taking me forever to get an upgrade from 1 GB to 2GB through - despite it being almost free it cost way more than just the price of the memory due to all the hours of meetings and performance logging and analysis etc to justify it. Then someone suggested an external RAM drive as an alternative which just delayed the whole thing even more :sigh: Eventually the computer I had went out of the "support" period so I got a brand new one anyway, which has 8 GB of RAM. Pretty sure the other guys has gone way past that point as well so dunno what's going on there.
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I think that developers should be issued nothing better than a Pentium 2. That way, when their product goes to market, instead of customers not being able to run it, because it requires the biggest, fastest computers, if it's to to crawl out of its box, it'll go like sh1t off a shovel. Result: Happier customers, and better-paid devs. Suck it in and use the worst one.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
How many programs actually need to run fast on the CPU though? In everything I've ever worked on the bottleneck has been the machine hosting the database and the network. Even for local standalone software I only ever seem to notice the disk being the bottleneck or sometimes the graphics card with games. We try to test our stuff for performance by having a test application server / database set up on a virtual machine hosted elsewhere on the network, so it's not all running on the same box. There aren't as many users hammering it as the live system but the presence of around 15 other virtual machines on the same box reduces the performance somewhat.
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He keeps getting promised it but it never seems to happen. TBH it was taking me forever to get an upgrade from 1 GB to 2GB through - despite it being almost free it cost way more than just the price of the memory due to all the hours of meetings and performance logging and analysis etc to justify it. Then someone suggested an external RAM drive as an alternative which just delayed the whole thing even more :sigh: Eventually the computer I had went out of the "support" period so I got a brand new one anyway, which has 8 GB of RAM. Pretty sure the other guys has gone way past that point as well so dunno what's going on there.
Dave Parker wrote:
Eventually the computer I had went out of the "support" period
Aha! Will throwing a machine out of the window make it go out of the support period? May still be cheaper than all those meetings.
Wout
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Well, I was being just a little bit sarcastic. Mind you, it would probably be better for everyone if games developers had their ankles shackled, so to speak.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Doh. At least I can blame the fact that sarcasm and text don't go together well.
Simon
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Doh. At least I can blame the fact that sarcasm and text don't go together well.
Simon
Simon P Stevens wrote:
At least I can blame the fact that sarcasm and text don't go together well.
You obviously haven't reviewed my code.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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If developers have bad machines they have a better incentive to make efficient code.
Wrong. It just means we do a "Rebuild entire solution" more often and go for coffee.
I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.
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Wrong. It just means we do a "Rebuild entire solution" more often and go for coffee.
I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.
You make it sound like it is a bad thing.
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(I hope you are missing the sarcasm icon) Creting efficient code means comparing different versions, run decent timing stats, more test cases, more tests to run etc. A slow machine is the best incentive to make your compiler shut up and let QA sort out the rest.
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| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchypeterchen wrote:
(I hope you are missing the sarcasm icon)
Make a guess. :rolleyes: On a more serious note, I do believe developers should be forced to regularily test their software on slow machines. But developing on them would be wasting both time and nerves.
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You make it sound like it is a bad thing.
Only when something actually needs to get done. :)
I wasn't, now I am, then I won't be anymore.
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Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:
My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:
Psh. None of y'all know what a pathetic dev box is. My current machine is a P4. No core anything duo. 2Gb of Ram. Had to scrape through the reject pile to get that. It has 2 hard drives. Each is 30Gb. I didn't miss a zero in that. A total of 60 Gb HD space. And the only reason I have the second drive is because I found it while I was scrounging for the extra RAM. Is it any wonder I prefer to work from home? (Core i7, 12 Gb RAM, SSD system drive + 500 Gb secondary drive)
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My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary Wheeler wrote:
My current work machine: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz, 4G RAM. Pathetic, no?
Only 2.53 ghz here; and about 2 or 2.5 years left before lifecycle replacement; OTOH my last 2 replacements were about a year prior to when they were due to be lifecycled. The 1st because when my XP install got overly crufty it was old enough there wasn't a company image for it and they discovered that the dell image was responsible for weird performance glitches. The second because when the win7 push came mine was 3 years old and they needed to get the interns newer laptops than they were using at the time; so they picked people with less than a year left who were power users and upgraded us early. OTOH I've been promised an upgrade to 8GB once the next batch of 4gb sodimms are ordered...
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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Psh. None of y'all know what a pathetic dev box is. My current machine is a P4. No core anything duo. 2Gb of Ram. Had to scrape through the reject pile to get that. It has 2 hard drives. Each is 30Gb. I didn't miss a zero in that. A total of 60 Gb HD space. And the only reason I have the second drive is because I found it while I was scrounging for the extra RAM. Is it any wonder I prefer to work from home? (Core i7, 12 Gb RAM, SSD system drive + 500 Gb secondary drive)
I'm afraid you, er, win.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Hi all, Just out of curiosity which is your worst developer machine? In our room, 3 developers, 10 machines [2 Core2Duo, 2 Pentium D & 6 Pentium 4], the best developers machine is Core2Duo E7300 4Gb ram and the worse machine is: Intel Pentium 4 3.40GHz, 2GB, Time taken to boot a windows server 2008 is 4 minutes. NOTE that in our organization there is an impression that we have the best machines :doh:
That's ridiculous when for $300 you can get a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM. The productivity increase would pay for itself with a couple months at most.