Large RAM, Multiple Cores, NVIDIA GPUs, Basic Make Toolchain

May 7, 2012

Posted By:  DeckerEgo

9 Votes

Status: Acknowledged

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Generally when doing development I try to place all the tiers of my webapp on my local box... it encourages me both take a devops/bootstrap mentality when doing development. On the plus side that encourages developers to know the whole stack, but on the downside it eats RAM. 8 GB of RAM is the default now on our developer workstations.

Also multiple cores within a CPU seems to count more than the actual clock speed - so four hyperthreaded cores are more valuable than four overclocked cores.

NVIDIA GPUs are also highly coveted within the development team, especially for those that run Linux. ATi's Linux drivers have always been horrible, especially with multi-montior setups. KDE4 has made configuring these and switching to projectors much easier, but NVIDIA seems to handle things better. The big test is always this: can I detach from my second monitor, walk to a conference room and connect to a projector without re-starting X?

As far as pre-installed stuff... if I have enough of a C/C++/Make toolchain going to re-build the kernel I generally can do whatever I need. I have yet to see a Linux distro actually bundle Java/Eclipse/NetBeans well, so I always prefer to download and install the latest on my own. Unfortunately OpenJDK isn't quite ready for prime time yet either... so I'm always using Sun's (yeah, I said it) JDK. If there was an easier way to install with updating /etc/alternatives that would be awesome.

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  • Aug 8, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: mwildam

    NVidia is a no-go for me! I want the "normal" Intel (those work best for me) - and I am not a gamer.
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  • May 10, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: AlfromRoke

    DeckerEgo - Of course the cores will be utilized (as the OS itself spawns countless threads), the issue is that the power itself isn't necessary. And either way, any development webserver you are running doesn't need to handle countless requests at once, but just a single request, so if it has trouble handling that single request on a mediocre machine I really am worrying what that same software will do when it get's 10000's of requests on a good server.
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  • May 10, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: TuxRaiderPen

    open source drivers are NOT the way to go. Regardless of any system or vendor, but most especially ati, or nVidia especially, the community drivers are terrible and nouveau is the WORST offender of them all. No thanks, first thing on any new install add XSWAT PPA, install OEM drivers.
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  • May 9, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: DeckerEgo

    AlfromRoke - 4 cores for web development is very useful, especially when you consider the importance of simultaneous operations. For example, let's say you have a webapp that has a service engine, an RDBMS, the front-end tier and perhaps Apache to serve static content. That's four separate tasks, each spawning their own threads, before even getting into the IDE, compilation threads and monitor threads. Plus if you ever do analysis using some sort of fork/join operation (i.e. R's ddply) then the multiple threads pay major dividends. It's not a clock frequency thing but more of a non-blocking operations thing, so four underclocked cores on a mobile i7 would be fine.

    We actually have several developers who are doing development on MacBook Airs (with 4 GB of RAM), and while they struggle it works. Given the new power profile of Ivy Bridge and integrated GPU power, and how dirt-cheap RAM is nowadays, I think ultrabook configurations of this type aren't too far off at all.
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  • May 9, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: DeckerEgo

    leif81 - you are right, the FOSS is much better. We've just noticed some rendering artifacts when using direct framebuffers or issues with compositing effects (wobbly windows, transparency, etc). It is definitely true that the FOSS driver is better. That's even becoming true with NVIDIA hardware and the noveau driver as well.
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  • May 9, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: leif81

    Just use the FOSS radeon driver. It's worked for me out of the box on every card I've thrown at it and it does multi monitor flawlessly. I haven't had a multi-monitor problem with the FOSS driver in years. I don't touch the proprietary ATI driver with a ten foot pole and why should I. The bundled FOSS driver works great for regular desktop/development stuff.
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  • May 8, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: AlfromRoke

    What you are describing is seriously *not* an 'ultrabook' and with that kind of development (I can't even phantom why you would need 4 cores to do web development o.O ) an ultrabook also isn't the right way to go right now yet (except with a dedicated remote desktop system setup possibly).