Re: Is Mac Mini capable to develop cocoa app?
Re: Is Mac Mini capable to develop cocoa app?
- Subject: Re: Is Mac Mini capable to develop cocoa app?
- From: Mark Dawson <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 21:49:17 -0800
All that said, if you are going to develop, 512 MB is the absolute
min,
and 1 GB is the preferred choice.
I guess I disagree -- a G3 iMac with 256 Mb is perfectly adequate to
develop Cocoa apps.
As a matter of fact, an application should be tested on the slowest
Mac with the least amount of memory.
I don't disagree about the testing; however, for developing, you want
what you can afford. A G3 with 256 MB might be just fine for a small
project--say taking 5 minutes to fully compile the whole program, and
maybe no more than 30 seconds for any individual file. That's
adequate. A dual 2.5 G5 with 1 GB of RAM might do the same in 45
seconds/5 seconds max per file. If you are stress testing your app
(guard malloc, etc), it runs quite a bit slower, so a faster machine
can really make a difference. All of those minutes here and there DO
add up.
For the mini, 512 MB is probably the min (depending on project size) to
negate the drive speed issue (running out of disk cache will be a lot
faster). Again, less RAM would be "adequate" for a small project, but
you'd really notice the lack of it on a larger one.
So it really comes down to how big your project is as to what's
adequate. If you can compile the whole thing in 5 minutes, you might
have diminishing returns going faster (than that baseline G3/256 MB).
However, if it takes you 25 minutes to compile, getting down to 5
minutes might be a huge win-- with a saving of 3 full compiles == 1
hour, if you do more than 240 full compiles in the lifetime of your
project @$50/hr, you'd pay for a fully loaded G5 ($4000 -- dual 2.5,
250 GB drive, 2 GB memory, NVidia 6800). That wouldn't even take
into account the incremental savings when only compiling a few files at
a time--so say you do 10 full compiles a week, that would mean you'd
"pay off" the machine in 6 months, quite a decent return on investment!
Even comparing a mini to a dual G5 (delta $3000 against a 1.42 1GB
SuperDrive mini, ), assuming 2.5x compile speedup, that would be a
savings of 15 min for a full compile, or 4 full compiles per hour.
You'd also need just 6 months (240 full compiles) to pay off the delta
between a mini and a G5 (fully loaded). This wouldn't take into account
profiling time (which would also be significantly faster on the G5).
Again, this only matters if time is money, you have a big enough
project that the delta time would build up quickly, and you
compile/link on a frequent, daily basis. A 6-7 month ROI can be
considered pretty darn good.
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