On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote: > If you have 9+GB of memory dedicated to building mozilla-central and you are > doing warm builds all the time, great, you probably don't need an SSD. But, > those conditions are specialized. You have to get things into the page > cache. That's a few GB of source files, the object files, ccache files, etc > over thousands of files. That's a lot of I/O and a lot of potential for I/O > wait. You also have everything else on your computer contending for that > page cache's memory. > > Essentially if you have a server that does nothing but build mozilla-central > all day, you are probably fine without an SSD. (Note that Mozilla's build > infra doesn't qualify because AFAIK the machines are rebooted after every > build, purging the page cache in the process.) If you are building on your > everyday computer which is also running a window manager, Firefox, etc, > you'll likely have more page cache eviction and slower build times assuming > I/O wait isn't short.
In practice, I've noticed minimal difference using SSDs on my desktop, which has 16G of RAM. I have lots of other stuff open, but all that only uses a couple of gigs of RAM, so there should certainly be 9G for page cache. (free -m reports about 7G used for buffers/cache.) If you use a desktop and work on compiled code even part-time, at any reasonable pay rate, I can't see any reason why you wouldn't get 16G of RAM. Although it seems most people don't -- maybe people mostly use laptops? 2x8G of desktop RAM is about $75 right now on Newegg, and any decent motherboard should take that much these days. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
