Developer oriented hardware benchmarks?

Question

Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places, but every hardware benchmark I've found, for nearly any component, is oriented towards gamers and/or workstations (video editing etc). Is there anyone doing benchmarks that are relevant to software developers?

For example, take SSDs. I don't care how fast Crysis loads off an SSD -- that is completely worthless information. What I want to know is, which drive yields the quickest build times? What about Intellisense and refactoring operations? What RAID configuration has the biggest benefit? I could probably come up with more examples, but you get the point.

Long story short, where are the benchmarks that tell me which hardware will be most effective in helping me be a productive software developer?

Answer 1

Most people aren't software developers, so naturally none of the benchmarks will say "look at this baby, it refactors 10,000 java classes 11% faster!"

Dev machines need the same stuff that gaming machines need (except maybe video): fast hard disks, lots of ram, fast CPU, in that order.

It depends on what kind of dev you're doing, but if you just buy something called "Workstation" or "Macintosh", and you'll be fine.

Answer 2

Here are the 'benchmarks' which help me determine whether a particular rig is likely to be more effective in promoting my software development productivity:

• area of display, summed over all displays - lots of windows open all over the place, the more I can see without switching the better;
• RAM - the more s/w dev tools I can have open and running at the same time, the better;
• CPU speed - the faster the tools run the better; adjust for multicore as appropriate;
• keyboard usability - so I never have to take my hands off it.

And that's about it. The proportion of say, disk read/write time to the total time I spend developing is so small that any increase in read/write speed is virtually worthless to me. Likewise, blistering fast graphics are irrelevant, most of what I work on is text of one sort or another.

As for builds, well yeah, I have some codes which can take an hour or so to make on a single processor so I'm looking at parallel makes. But I'm not looking for faster disks.

Well, that's what I think.

Answer 3

Take a look at Dacris Benchmarks - it's got a hard drive benchmark that measures performance in MB/s (a measure of the raw throughput of the hardware) with no bias towards specific uses.

It also has a handy System Grade tab that tells you how the system as a whole will perform in various roles (including as a software development box).

Answer 4

Regarding HDD speed I'd say that a developer rig doesn't need the same as a gaming rig. When compiling stuff, the system usually has to load a gazillion, randomly placed, small files, whereas when playing games it has to read some fairly large files when entering a scene, a match or w/e. In short - the best hard drive for a developer rig is an SSD.

Regarding the rest of the system, Im not sure. I've been looking for the same type of benchmarks lately, due to my team having some major performance issues with our rigs - but I've yet to come across anything useable.

I ended up doing a powershell script to automate some work with Visual Studio and record the time spent. It's very specific, requires installing VS and that you have a fairly big solution to build (but you could take any OSS project). And it doesn't say anything about how the IDE performs when used interactively - if Intellisense is snappy and if the context menus are lagging for seconds to pop up.