50 hour projects

[Petermint]

Sometimes it takes 50 hours to get your code right. Sometimes it takes 50 hours to run the code. What do you do for 50 hours?

When I have a long running process, a game of cards uses very little resources and does not slow down processing, compared to shooters. Late at night, a quick game of something like Doom should wake me up but I find games at that level all slow down the processor or disk. Loud music works but music videos chew up resources.

Coffee works for the first few cups then makes people sleepier. It helps into the evening but not for an all nighter.

A second computer for entertainment looks like the best investment. Break up the evening with something loud, fast, and exciting. Kate Perry's Roar.

I am already using the fastest SSD. My processor is usually faster than the SSD.

[catweazel]

What do you do for 50 hours?

Build a faster computer.

[Petermint]

A couple of SSDs in RAID 1 could make the disks as fast as the processor. A few thousand dollars could get me five * 1TB SSD in RAID 5 and that would help the disk oriented projects. Not so the "has to be fixed by the morning" projects where I have to remove years of really bad programming by a random collection of people who did not care.

I found two big screens helps compare code. Meld finally works with decent size projects. Nemo has split screen and some other nice fixes in recent releases. Some of the 50 hour projects could have been 20 hours with LM 18.3.

I find that fast computers have to be really fast when you try to play a HD video or game along side an analysis program. There is too much interference between tasks. You also get the stupid programs that use only one core, making the latest 16 core processors a waste.

Linux is a little closer to realtime and more efficient. Ext4 is a big improvement of Ext3. Some of the development languages are still stuck in the 1950s the way they handle data, memory allocation, and other things. They work with the ten rows of test data then choke when you give them a 0.3 GB file.

[catweazel]

A couple of SSDs in RAID 1 could make the disks as fast as the processor.

That depends entirely on the CPU; in particular it depends on the number of free PCI lanes, and the throughput of the CPU's SIMD/SSE. You would need to use RAID0 with at least a pair of Samsung NVMe at 32000Mb/s or a pair of Intel Optane SSDs to get even close to swamping a modern CPU. If you need disk speed then you're far better off with RAID0 and a good backup regimen than you will ever be with RAID1, which is a mirror so the system has to do two full disk writes for every one.

A few thousand dollars could get me five * 1TB SSD in RAID 5

RAID5 requires the calculation of parity so if you go that route, you're better off with hardware RAID. Calculating parity is going to kill your CPU in heavy loading situations if the CPU simply isn't up to it.

Besides, I feel that what you're planning is going to leave you very disappointed if you run software or fake RAID instead hardware RAID.

[Petermint]

I would need a CPU speed increase for RAID 5. Faster clock cycle rather than many slow cores as there is so much software that still does not use multiple cores effectively. Based on using hardware and software RAID in the past, hardware RAID is a very expensive way of replacing a minor motherboard upgrade when you want less than eight disks.

There is a reasonably priced motherboard with 3 * NVMe M.2 slots. It looks like a good starting point for a next gen PC. Could start with one SSD then add as prices fall. The same with memory. Add two sticks now and two later.

[nicolesharp100]

Try playing old games on DOSBox. I doubt they use much resources. Or read books: https://www.gutenberg.org/.

[Petermint]

Firefox now uses all cores instead of one. The software is slowly catching up with modern processors.

[Joe2Shoe]

Beer.................