Best Way to Boost Developer Productivity
November 8th, 2006This has happened to me so much the past couple of years. I am working along and then have to wait for the computer to finish something. I look at the Task Manager and see the processor is hardly busy, but the green light indicating hard drive activity quickly blinks at me. The speed of the computer is bound to the slow, slow hard drive and not the processor. When will they learn?
I sit at a computer now which has a stock Dell hard drive in it. Such a hard drive is like the Seagate Barracuda with 40gb of storage space and a 2mb cache for $56. In comparison, they could install another drive with 320gb of storage and 16mb cache at a cost of $99. That $40 investment would dramatically cut down on the delays.
Last night I installed the .NET 3.0 runtime. It took less than 10 minutes to finish. I also did it inside one of my virtual machines so there it will automatically be a little slower than usual, but the hard drive has the 16mb cache which makes all the difference. Today at work it has taken over 20 minutes so far. It has a pathetic 2mb cache.
What I run at home is a set of virtual instances with most of them hosted outside my laptop on a fast external drive running in a drive enclosure which is connected to the computer using FireWire. (read why)
If you do not have such a setup yet, I strongly suggest getting it. For the $100 hard drive and $40 enclosure, you will have a much faster system so you can be much more productive. And if you host your virtual environment on the external drive, it has the added benefit of making your environment highly portable.
November 10th, 2006 at 8:40 am
It is also very important to configure your virtual memory to use a different physical HDD than the one your OS is installed on... Just buying that 40$ drive and putting it in your pc as a d drive, and configuring your swap space to use it, could increase your system perf by as much as 25%
Dan
November 10th, 2006 at 9:23 am
Dan,
How would you handle the disconnected drive? Most of the time I do leave the external drive attached, but when I go to a coffee shop what happens to the swap space for the external drive? Can I disconnect a drive which is configured with swap space on that drive?
November 10th, 2006 at 11:04 am
No, the drive has to be internal, windows would crash if it had a problem accessing the drive / swapfile
Dan
November 10th, 2006 at 11:17 am
http://digg.com/hardware/USB_Flash_Memory_for_Windows_Vista_ReadyBoost
That is another way to speed things up. Basically you attach a USB thumb drive and Vista can use it for swap space instead of just the internal drive. My guess is that you also do not want to yank it out if it is actively managing swap data. But these days it appars a 1GB memory chip is roughly the same cost as a USB thumb drive, so I may as well just increase the existing memory.
Brennan
November 15th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
If you want to run Visual Studio and SQL server and IIS, and anything else, for an prolonged development session, best to get 2 gigs.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
[...] I will be able to sit out on my balcony with the laptop and remote into these environments. I could even poke a hole in the incoming internet connection to allow access to Remote Desktop from my office or a coffee shop. I remote into my web server all of the time, so it should be more than reasonable for performance. In fact, I think it will perform very well. I will always hook it up to the fastest external drives as the computer ages and I can update the memory whenever I need a boost. The processor could be a concern in a couple of years, but a dual Athlon 64 should be sufficient for several years since the real bottleneck is disk access speed. [...]
November 1st, 2007 at 10:30 am
[...] using Visual Studio recently. The newest entry is by Scott Guthrie. He makes a similar point so what I suggested last year. The hard drive speed is very important. However, I would like to point out some additional details [...]