Re: Distributed build overhead and Mac Mini vs XServe pricing
Re: Distributed build overhead and Mac Mini vs XServe pricing
- Subject: Re: Distributed build overhead and Mac Mini vs XServe pricing
- From: James Bucanek <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 10:56:13 -0700
Mark Dawson wrote on Sunday, January 16, 2005:
>>> I believe that the Mac Mini has a 4200 rpm drive so the I/O
>>> performance is not going to compete with the faster disks you find in
>>> the G5 PowerMac or the xServe. However, as you point out the price
>>> for a Mac mini is much lower, so using more Mac Minis may compensate
>>> (don't know since I've never tried).
>>>
>> That's quite slow by current standards (I guess there's quite a price
>> saving). My PowerBook G4 has the 5400 RPM drive, but that's still a
>> bit faster. During a distributed build is the local drive used for
>> retrieving framework headers etc. ? Or does the data coming across the
>> net include a fully precompiled set of headers with everything in it?
Personal experience would show that the speed of your hard drive will make little or no difference in build times. (Others have pointed out that even a RAM disk makes little difference.) As long as you've got enough RAM, almost everything in your build will quickly be cached into RAM automatically.
I, admittedly, have plenty of RAM (4.5GB). When I start building, and rebuilding, large projects I never see the disk drive get hit. Reads are almost nonexistent, and writes only get going at the last moment when the executable get written. (I run iPulse, so it's easy to watch the file I/O in real-time.) This is because once you've started working in XCode for even a minute or two, almost all of your source and intermediate files have already been cached by the file system.
For a "MiniGrid" I suspect that the biggest factors are going to be network speed and the amount of RAM in each Mini.
--
James Bucanek <mailto:email@hidden>
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