How to speed up the development Machine

To do well, you must first sharpen your tools. As developers, computers are a tool for us to eat. To a certain extent, the running speed of the machine determines the production efficiency of our development, or at least affects our development mood-it takes half a day to execute a command, and no one can stand it. I have used many machines myself and shared my experiences on how to select development machine configurations and speed up the running of development machines.

First, hardware is fundamental, and now hardware is cheap. 4G memory is less than two hundred, and 1 TB hard drive is less than 450. Thousands of dollars can be used to create good machines. Remember that when we were in college, we needed 230 yuan for a 1 MB of memory, 460 yuan for two MB of memory, 8 yuan for a 5-inch floppy disk, and more than two thousand yuan for a 40 MB hard disk. In contrast, it's really great now. Since it is a tool for making money, I don't think it is necessary to save that money for the purpose of development efficiency. It seems to save money. In fact, it actually reduces work efficiency, but the company suffers losses. Of course, this is a developer. If it is a clerk or tester, it is another matter.

We recommend that you use a desktop instead of a notebook. Although the notebook is already in the super era, the performance of the notebook CPU and hard disk (non-Solid State) is inferior to that of the desktop; the display is small, and the head is low for a long time, causing great damage to the cervical spine; the keyboard and mouse are also very limited, and long-term programming is not good for the shoulder. I have seen many laptop development cases, and there are indeed some laptops with a certain speed. However, the overall development efficiency of a notebook is not just a star-to-half ratio to that of a desktop. If conditions permit, try to use a desktop. A notebook is suitable for demonstration, document writing, and business trips.

It is better to use intel as the CPU. Of course, AMD is enough, but the effect is slightly poor. The most common thing for development is code compilation. The main resource required for compilation is the CPU memory hard disk. Many compilers do not support multi-threaded compilation, so the CPU frequency of a single core is more important. So it seems that the core CPU with turbo boost is very necessary, such as I3 or I5 are good. Of course there are conditions where i7 is better, but most people do not need such high performance. If you do not run a virtual machine or access the Internet, the CPU usage of the four cores will basically not exceed 50%, usually 0 ~ 25% is a waste of resources, and the remaining 75% is a waste of resources. If you want to build eight cores, you can only use 12.5%. At present, the mainstream CPU is very good, so the CPU is generally not a bottleneck for development. AMD's CPU is obviously inferior to intel in terms of Turbo frequency, and it is also limited when running certain virtual machine systems (such as MAC). Therefore, AMD is not recommended if conditions are met, however, AMD is sufficient in most cases.

In terms of hard disks, ordinary mainstream high-speed hard disks can be used, conditional solid state disks + mechanical hard disks. The amount of data read and write during development is very large, so hard disk is the biggest bottleneck. It is best to build a large-capacity solid state drive; if not, a small solid state drive carries a mechanical hard drive, and the operating system and main program files are all stored on the solid state drive, other backups and infrequently used files are stored on the HDD. Mechanical hard drives require high speed, fast read/write speed, and high cache. From the speed bottleneck, it is much more cost-effective to invest in a solid state drive than to upgrade the CPU from I5 to i7. If this condition is not met, a high-performance, large-capacity mechanical hard drive with at least 60 MB of cache can also achieve high read/write speeds.

The memory is also a bottleneck. The larger the memory, the faster the better. At least 4 GB of memory is required, which is cheaper now. We recommend that you create 6 GB or 8 GB memory, and then remove the virtual memory. Use pure physical memory to run Windows to avoid affecting the speed of page switching with the disk. The virtual memory set on the hard disk is definitely one of the biggest performance barriers. Virtual Memory is the product of too small and too expensive memory in the Win9x era. It is no longer necessary to use it now-of course, you cannot use a small memory on the old machine.

Programming does not require high graphics cards. It is good to use a core graphics card or integrated graphics card. There is no need to spend more money on independent graphics cards. But the monitor should be better to protect your eyes. The larger the display, the better (such as 27-inch), for easy viewing of program code. The specific size depends on the budget. The keyboard and mouse must feel better. The power dissipation fan of the chassis is free.

Finally, the software cannot be installed in disorder. No good hardware can run too many things. Useless services and startup items are disabled, especially for programs that are resident in memory and are often active. I don't need anti-virus software. It's too resource-consuming. I 'd rather be poisoned than affecting the performance. It's a big deal to reinstall the system. Previously, I used anti-virus software on XP and 2003. It was so slow that I had to re-install the virus several times. On the contrary, Windows 7 is indeed safe, anti-virus software is not used and has not been reinstalled so far. Nowadays, many software will reside in the memory and connect to the network in the background. It is annoying to install a cloud platform. Some software that is occasionally used can be downloaded and used directly from the cloud, in this way, you can disable the cloud when you do not need to use it at ordinary times to prevent these background programs from running.

Performance is actually just a feeling. In the past, 386 CPU, 2 MB memory, 5-inch disk, and DoS boot only took 10 seconds (of course, the old programmer should remember that there was a turbo key to be pressed on the machine at that time ); now, even if you have a 4-core cpu ssd, it takes more than 10 seconds to start the system.

Note: -- 20130529 modify