OT: productivity and long computing delays
Larry Bates
larry.bates at websafe.com
Wed Sep 27 16:04:45 EDT 2006
Paul Rubin wrote:
> I'm doing something where I frequently but unpredictably (i.e. I can't
> plan for it in advance) hit a snag that requires me to rebuild a large
> project. The rebuild takes a couple hours. During that time, I'm
> twiddling my thumbs and/or posting here, i.e. not getting anything
> useful done. But the delay is not long enough that I can really
> switch to another project for a while.
>
> Anyone got any suggestions? How do you deal with this? It could be
> mitigated with a faster computer (I'm using a 1.2 ghz Pentium M) but
> the overall task isn't large enough to justify going out and buying
> one. Anyway, I did the same build on a 2 ghz Athlon 64 and was
> surprised that the speedup was only 35% or so. I'd have to get a
> multiprocessor box to obtain really substantial gains.
Just guessing - A significant portion of the time might be I/O
that is disk bound so faster CPU won't help. If that's the case
faster hard drive (10K or even 15K rpm) or a striped drive array
could help. You should also check memory, if CPU starts
swapping, the swap I/O will kill your performance.
-Larry Bates
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