[ale] A faster Java box - any tips ??

[Michael Hirsch]

On 10/9/05, Greg <runman at speedfactory.net> wrote:
>
> I am looking for any tips/comments/advice on buying a fast machine to do
> J2EE on. I am developing in Eclipse and working on large web applications
> and it seems that my current box is pretty slow. I am using the one box to
> run my database, run whichever AS/Servlets container I need (JBoss, Resin,
> or plain old Tomcat), and I try to only recompile whatever has changed and
> not the whole thing. I started out with all of my web apps in the same
> workspace but since it slowed it down I now only load one at a time and
> pull
> up any other pages in another app individually if I need to refer to them.
>
> I have tried developing on a dual 64-bit Opteron (2.0 GHz) with 2 GB of
> memory and on a 3.6 GHz HP laptop with 1 GB of memory and the laptop seems
> way faster than the dual box. I have been told that the most important
> thing is clock speed and that using 2 processors is irrelevant. Is this
> correct ? Is AMD's FX line of processors (2.8 GHz) faster than Intel's P4
> (I think around 3.74 GHz) ? Does RAM matter past 1 GB ?? Any opinions of
> using a SCSI HD/PCI card vs. a SATA HD through the motherboard ?


I'd say that your setup should be well served by a dial CPU system. You have
multiple applications running, eclipse, JBoss, DB server) and a
multiprocessor will deal nicely with that. also, Jva tends to use multiple
threads and a multiprocessor will be good.

When compiling probably only one processor will be used, so a faster CPU
will help with pure compiling speed.

To keep from being disk I/O bound, the extra RAM should help. So in general,
I'd think that the opteron system sounds very good. Remember that an AMD at
a given MHz is faster than an Intel chip at the same MHz, so you can't just
compare clock speed.

OTOH, I'm not sure that 64 bit computing is realy for desktop prime time. I
have a desktop similar to your dual CPU Opteron system, but with less memory
and it has not been a great experience. I just upgraded to Mandriva 2006
(yes, 2006, not 2005. Marketing wins again) which came out last week and it
feels much zippier than the previous release. I haven't tried my java apps
yet, however. I don't know if the speedup is in the kernel or in the KDE
apps/libraries, but something sure has improved. I'd recommend making sure
that your system is up to date.

Michael
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