Idle Time

My 4 GiB of memory from Other World Computing arrived today. Woo-hoo!

My Mac Pro came with 1 GiB of memory, which is the same as what I have in my Cube—but when you have four times as many processors, you need at least four times as much memory, especially for things like compiling programs. (Xcode will deploy one compiler per processor, and make can be instructed to deploy any number of tasks at a time with its -j flag.)

I waited to get more RAM because the Apple Store charged one-and-a-half kilobucks for the 4-GiB kit. Now, it’s down to only $1200—woo-hoo! But OWC still beats the Apple Store by more than half: the 4 GiB I bought cost me only $500. That’s still expensive by the Cube’s standards, but I was getting really tired of the paging, and it certainly beats the heck out of Apple’s prices.

Here’s the before-and-after of Adium build times:

1 GiB of RAM—2007-04-20:

svnversion               %~/Projects/@otherpeoplesprojects/adium/trunk-clean(0)
19517
___
time xcodebuild -configuration Deployment
** BUILD SUCCEEDED **
xcodebuild -configuration Deployment
  252.57s user 232.52s system 196% cpu 4:07.33 total

5 GiB of RAM—2007-04-26:

svnversion               %~/Projects/@otherpeoplesprojects/adium/trunk-clean(0)
19517
___
time xcodebuild -configuration Deployment
** BUILD SUCCEEDED **
xcodebuild -configuration Deployment
  243.32s user 220.05s system 232% cpu 3:19.21 total

Both tests were run with no existing build folder. Prior to each xcodebuild, I ran the same xcodebuild in order to defeat any caching issues.

Categories: Adium. | Comments: 1 (feed).