Specifications for a machine for JEE development

[Jan Paulsen]

Hi there

My aging machine seems to be a little underspecified for running what I
want. Hence I though I'd try to ask you guys what is required for
running this suite of development tools: NetBeans 6.7, Glassfish 2,
Oracle XE 10, FireFox 3 and some kind of word processing product,
preferably OpenOffice, plus Emacs and a couple of shells and whatever I
forgot. Everything will be running on the latest Ubuntu.

I'm currently running an aging single core AMD64 3,2GHz 1Gb 5400RPM
notebook and development is starting to be a drag with especially
NetBeans pausing all the time looking up e.g. code completions. As far
as I can tell, a lot of time is spent on I/O waits, probably because of
lack of memory. Indicators show that my 1Gb physical memory is fully
utilized and another gigabyte or so is on the swap partition.

The machine is and will primarily be used for "spare time" projects, but
if it produces results presentable to customers, that would of course be
very nice.

So I have my eyes set on a dual core T4200 at 2GHz, 3Gb RAM, 5400RPM. As
far as I can tell, the 3Gb RAM should help the swapping if not
completely eliminate it (yeah, I wish). The harddisk is, I think/hope,
speedy enough for my uses as I'm using development data, meaning that
the volume of the data is small. What I'm a bit concerned about is the
speed of the CPU as I don't really know how good the software is a
utilising dual cores. Also, I'm quite happy with the NetBeans feature
for looking up JavaDoc comments and I'm wondering if search speed for
the harddisk is adequate for looking up this documentation.

Of course, an alternative would be to go for some quad core i7 6GB
7200RPM host, but I'd really to stick with notebooks and found this
nice, small thing.

So, could I beg you to give me your 2 cents worth?

Pardon me if I'm off-topic...

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Donkey Hottie]

Of course, an alternative would be to go for some quad
core i7 6GB 7200RPM host, but I'd really to stick with
notebooks and found this nice, small thing.

So, could I beg you to give me your 2 cents worth?

I tend to use my computers at least for 10 years, so I usually buy the best
there is available.

I do not like notebookes, so your alternative is my dream host. But if you
really need a notebook, you can do fine for a year with your suggested
setup.

My current workstation runs with an AMD 1900+ CPU with 1,5gigs RAM and a 40G
hard drive (dunno aboute the RPM). That was about as good as it gets in 2002
when I bought this.

My next rig will be "some quad core i7 6GB 7200RPM host" but preferably with
8GB and with two of those CPU's.

My current rig handles so or so the Netbeans 6.7 (which is buggy! Buggy I
say!, waiting for 6.7.1!!) but that is not much really.

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Hi there

My aging machine seems to be a little underspecified for running what I
want. Hence I though I'd try to ask you guys what is required for
running this suite of development tools: NetBeans 6.7, Glassfish 2,
Oracle XE 10, FireFox 3 and some kind of word processing product,
preferably OpenOffice, plus Emacs and a couple of shells and whatever I
forgot. Everything will be running on the latest Ubuntu.

I'm currently running an aging single core AMD64 3,2GHz 1Gb 5400RPM
notebook and development is starting to be a drag with especially
NetBeans pausing all the time looking up e.g. code completions. As far
as I can tell, a lot of time is spent on I/O waits, probably because of
lack of memory. Indicators show that my 1Gb physical memory is fully
utilized and another gigabyte or so is on the swap partition.

The machine is and will primarily be used for "spare time" projects, but
if it produces results presentable to customers, that would of course be
very nice.

So I have my eyes set on a dual core T4200 at 2GHz, 3Gb RAM, 5400RPM. As
far as I can tell, the 3Gb RAM should help the swapping if not
completely eliminate it (yeah, I wish). The harddisk is, I think/hope,
speedy enough for my uses as I'm using development data, meaning that
the volume of the data is small. What I'm a bit concerned about is the
speed of the CPU as I don't really know how good the software is a
utilising dual cores. Also, I'm quite happy with the NetBeans feature
for looking up JavaDoc comments and I'm wondering if search speed for
the harddisk is adequate for looking up this documentation.

Of course, an alternative would be to go for some quad core i7 6GB
7200RPM host, but I'd really to stick with notebooks and found this
nice, small thing.

So, could I beg you to give me your 2 cents worth?

Pardon me if I'm off-topic...

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

I'd say a discussion of what's good for J2EE development is on-topic.

My "aging" home machine is a Dell Dimension 3100 with Windows XP/Ubuntu,
single core Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, 160 GB HD. The key upgrade to keep it
_adequate_ for home development with J2EE and .NET was upgrading RAM to
2 GB. With this setup I can run what you describe, but I probably
wouldn't want to add in something like Oracle SOA Suite at the same time
with big applications (which, BTW, runs fine on Ubuntu, however).

AS you surmised RAM is the big thing - not CPU speed. And I really
wouldn't worry about HD access times for documentation, not if you're
buying a newish machine these days. RAM is the key.

For my actual work laptop (a MacBook Pro) I have 4 GB RAM, and it only
gets a bit slow when it's doing very intensive things like running
Oracle SOA on Windows XP Pro on a Parallels VM, plus a J2EE server on
Mac OS X with SQL Developer and Eclipse etc etc. Based on this I'd
consider 3 GB to be OK, but given the low price of RAM I'd pay for more,
4 gigs at least.

AHS

 

[markspace]

lack of memory. Indicators show that my 1Gb physical memory is fully
utilized and another gigabyte or so is on the swap partition.

I'd agree. You could probably just buy some more RAM and use your
current machine for another year or so.

So I have my eyes set on a dual core T4200 at 2GHz, 3Gb RAM, 5400RPM. As

For a new machine, I'd try to get a little more than this. The RAM is
fine for a laptop, but try to get at least 2.2 GHz dual core and a
7200RPM drive. Swapping and IO is much less of a hassle if your drive
is faster too.

My advice: buy some RAM now, then start saving some money away for the
improved system.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

My aging machine seems to be a little underspecified for running what I
want. Hence I though I'd try to ask you guys what is required for
running this suite of development tools: NetBeans 6.7, Glassfish 2,
Oracle XE 10, FireFox 3 and some kind of word processing product,
preferably OpenOffice, plus Emacs and a couple of shells and whatever I
forgot. Everything will be running on the latest Ubuntu.

I'm currently running an aging single core AMD64 3,2GHz 1Gb 5400RPM
notebook and development is starting to be a drag with especially
NetBeans pausing all the time looking up e.g. code completions. As far
as I can tell, a lot of time is spent on I/O waits, probably because of
lack of memory. Indicators show that my 1Gb physical memory is fully
utilized and another gigabyte or so is on the swap partition.

The machine is and will primarily be used for "spare time" projects, but
if it produces results presentable to customers, that would of course be
very nice.

So I have my eyes set on a dual core T4200 at 2GHz, 3Gb RAM, 5400RPM. As
far as I can tell, the 3Gb RAM should help the swapping if not
completely eliminate it (yeah, I wish). The harddisk is, I think/hope,
speedy enough for my uses as I'm using development data, meaning that
the volume of the data is small. What I'm a bit concerned about is the
speed of the CPU as I don't really know how good the software is a
utilising dual cores. Also, I'm quite happy with the NetBeans feature
for looking up JavaDoc comments and I'm wondering if search speed for
the harddisk is adequate for looking up this documentation.

Running five heavy apps including two super multithreaded apps
like app server and db server can easily use two cores.

If you plan on using a 64 bit Ubuntu, then you could put more
than 3 GB of RAM in.

A 7200 RPM disk for the laptop would also be a possibility
that would increase performance even with low data volumes.

You should save on the graphics card. NetBeans will not lag
no matter how low-end it is.

Pardon me if I'm off-topic...

It is not really a programming question, but it would obviously
require a Java programmer to evaluate performance with those
specific apps, so it is within the secondary topics that
are tied into Java programming.

Arne

 

[Roedy Green]

I tend to use my computers at least for 10 years, so I usually buy the best
there is available.

I used to do that, but I always bought a bit behind the bleeding edge,
and replaced it piecemeal over its life. I did this both to save money
and for extra reliability.

Now packaged machines are so much cheaper than putting together
components, I do it that way, and replace the whole machine. Also the
quality is much higher than it used to be. You don't have to make
your own cables and put everything together yourself to get a quality
product.

Your machine sounds much like what I am using now. see
http://mindprod.com/contact/equipment.html It is adequate. The main
place I would like some extra oomph is loading the IntelliJ Idea IDE.
The problem is software finds ever new ways to chew up CPU as the
speed of the average machine increases, so I would guess you might be
getting grumpy over your choice within a couple of years. There is
plenty to keep two CPUs busy, even with single thread apps. It gives a
much smoother feel to the machine.

I will guess over the life of the machine you will expand it to 8 gig
RAM, so make sure it has the slots for it.

We need a simple way to compute the cost of the electricity used over
the life of a computer so power efficiency can be factored into the
initial cost.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind as a stone, and as irrational as a headless hen."
~ Ambrose Bierce (born: 1842-06-24 died: 1914 at age: 71)

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

My current workstation runs with an AMD 1900+ CPU with 1,5gigs RAM and a
40G hard drive (dunno aboute the RPM). That was about as good as it gets
in 2002 when I bought this.

My next rig will be "some quad core i7 6GB 7200RPM host" but preferably
with 8GB and with two of those CPU's.

i7 is for only for one socket configs. You need Xeon >= 5000 for
multi socket configs (even though that the new Xeon's will use
the same Nehalem technology as i7).

Arne

PS: And that was off-topic.

 

[Jan Paulsen]

I'd say a discussion of what's good for J2EE development is on-topic.

My "aging" home machine is a Dell Dimension 3100 with Windows XP/Ubuntu,
single core Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, 160 GB HD. The key upgrade to keep it
_adequate_ for home development with J2EE and .NET was upgrading RAM to
2 GB. With this setup I can run what you describe, but I probably
wouldn't want to add in something like Oracle SOA Suite at the same time
with big applications (which, BTW, runs fine on Ubuntu, however).

AS you surmised RAM is the big thing - not CPU speed. And I really
wouldn't worry about HD access times for documentation, not if you're
buying a newish machine these days. RAM is the key.

For my actual work laptop (a MacBook Pro) I have 4 GB RAM, and it only
gets a bit slow when it's doing very intensive things like running
Oracle SOA on Windows XP Pro on a Parallels VM, plus a J2EE server on
Mac OS X with SQL Developer and Eclipse etc etc. Based on this I'd
consider 3 GB to be OK, but given the low price of RAM I'd pay for more,
4 gigs at least.

AHS

Thank you for your input, AHS. I've been doing a little bit more
research and found notebooks allowing 4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM and dual
cores at 2,4GHz. And at a reasonable price. The downside is integrated
video, but I've been such a bore graphics-wise for years now that I
don't think that'll be a problem (completely ignoring Aero).

I think this is a quite interesting topic, even if I wasn't about to
move my main computer to a rather more anonymous position.

And, yes, I sure wish my notebook could work with more than 1Gb RAM...

Hoping more people will join this thread...

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Jan Paulsen]

Hi there

My aging machine seems to be a little underspecified for running what I
want. Hence I though I'd try to ask you guys what is required for
running this suite of development tools: NetBeans 6.7, Glassfish 2,
Oracle XE 10, FireFox 3 and some kind of word processing product,
preferably OpenOffice, plus Emacs and a couple of shells and whatever I
forgot. Everything will be running on the latest Ubuntu.

I'm currently running an aging single core AMD64 3,2GHz 1Gb 5400RPM
notebook and development is starting to be a drag with especially
NetBeans pausing all the time looking up e.g. code completions. As far
as I can tell, a lot of time is spent on I/O waits, probably because of
lack of memory. Indicators show that my 1Gb physical memory is fully
utilized and another gigabyte or so is on the swap partition.

The machine is and will primarily be used for "spare time" projects, but
if it produces results presentable to customers, that would of course be
very nice.

So I have my eyes set on a dual core T4200 at 2GHz, 3Gb RAM, 5400RPM. As
far as I can tell, the 3Gb RAM should help the swapping if not
completely eliminate it (yeah, I wish). The harddisk is, I think/hope,
speedy enough for my uses as I'm using development data, meaning that
the volume of the data is small. What I'm a bit concerned about is the
speed of the CPU as I don't really know how good the software is a
utilising dual cores. Also, I'm quite happy with the NetBeans feature
for looking up JavaDoc comments and I'm wondering if search speed for
the harddisk is adequate for looking up this documentation.

Of course, an alternative would be to go for some quad core i7 6GB
7200RPM host, but I'd really to stick with notebooks and found this
nice, small thing.

So, could I beg you to give me your 2 cents worth?

Pardon me if I'm off-topic...

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

[replying to the original post to save your scroll button]

So, current status is that I'm set at 4GB RAM, which should do it for
now. Sadly, my trusted Fujitsu-Siemens cannot handle more than 1GB RAM
(yes, I now, stupid to combine with 64 bit cpu, but I went for it for
the speed).

For me, buying a machine hoping it'll last 10 years doesn't work, but I
am of course glad that it works for other people. I try to look no
further than three or maybe four years down the road, being absolutely
confident that some "revolution" will mean that could not have
anticipated the requirements earlier on.

I'm really interested in 5400RPM vs. 7200RPM now. Does it really matter
that much for the tool set mentioned (being absolutely confident that
some "revolution" will mean that I cannot anticipate requirements a few
years ahead in time, duplicate expression intended).

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

-- Harddisk: you should try to get two of them, and use them in RAID1
(mirroring).

Few laptops have space for two disks.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

I'm really interested in 5400RPM vs. 7200RPM now. Does it really matter
that much for the tool set mentioned

Most likely it does.

Software today is huge.

Try count how must space the software use.

The stuff you use will need to be read from the hard drive.

Arne

 

[Jan Paulsen]

Most likely it does.

Software today is huge.

Try count how must space the software use.

The stuff you use will need to be read from the hard drive.

Arne

Good point. This is a really difficult question, I know, since we
probably won't be able to compare two otherwise identical systems wrt.
RPM. Perhaps what I was trying to ask is that if going 7200 RPM would
decrease search speeds in a way which is noticeable in the mentioned
tool set, especially NetBeans, which I guess does a lot of searching
while editing (which is my primary concern). Risking being called lazy,
I'm not going to quantify all bits and bytes to be transferred, but I
must say that I am interested in the subjective experience. So, are you
running 5400RPM and finding the NetBeans editor a bit sluggish? Or are
you running 7200RPM and finding no delays whatsoever while typing?

Thanks for all the input, guys, this is really helpful. Of course, I
hope this is of interest to other people as well.

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Jan Paulsen]

Good point. This is a really difficult question, I know, since we
probably won't be able to compare two otherwise identical systems wrt.
RPM. Perhaps what I was trying to ask is that if going 7200 RPM would
decrease search speeds in a way which is noticeable in the mentioned
tool set, especially NetBeans, which I guess does a lot of searching
while editing (which is my primary concern). Risking being called lazy,
I'm not going to quantify all bits and bytes to be transferred, but I
must say that I am interested in the subjective experience. So, are you
running 5400RPM and finding the NetBeans editor a bit sluggish? Or are
you running 7200RPM and finding no delays whatsoever while typing?

Thanks for all the input, guys, this is really helpful. Of course, I
hope this is of interest to other people as well.

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

I am really sorry that this is getting to be centered around NetBeans.
That's not the idea, but I find the speed of the harddisk to be
particularly noticeable in this tool (now wait 'till I get some real
data for that route planning application....).

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Good point. This is a really difficult question, I know, since we
probably won't be able to compare two otherwise identical systems wrt.
RPM. Perhaps what I was trying to ask is that if going 7200 RPM would
decrease search speeds in a way which is noticeable in the mentioned
tool set, especially NetBeans, which I guess does a lot of searching
while editing (which is my primary concern). Risking being called lazy,
I'm not going to quantify all bits and bytes to be transferred, but I
must say that I am interested in the subjective experience. So, are you
running 5400RPM and finding the NetBeans editor a bit sluggish? Or are
you running 7200RPM and finding no delays whatsoever while typing?

You can pick the test at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-2.5-mobile-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,53.html
that you think reflex your usage.

Arne

 

[Jan Paulsen]

You can pick the test at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-2.5-mobile-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,53.html

that you think reflex your usage.

Arne

Thanks. Of course, the thing with these sort of tests is that none of
them really reflects my usage. My usage is some searching, some
transferring, some waiting (while reading ahead), then some whatever.
That's why I'm asking for the subjective experience. But don't get me
wrong, I do appreciate your reference, thank you very much for it.

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Jan Paulsen]

Thanks. Of course, the thing with these sort of tests is that none of
them really reflects my usage. My usage is some searching, some
transferring, some waiting (while reading ahead), then some whatever.
That's why I'm asking for the subjective experience. But don't get me
wrong, I do appreciate your reference, thank you very much for it.

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

Hmm... I guess by "subjective experience" I am asking for usage
scenarios.... Hmmm....

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Jan Paulsen]

You can pick the test at:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-2.5-mobile-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,53.html

that you think reflex your usage.

Arne

Arne, I just reread my posts and realized that they could be offending.
That was certainly not the intend and I'm sorry if it came out that way.
Thank you very much for your input, again.

Regards,
Jan Paulsen

 

[Lew]

I am really sorry that this is getting to be centered around NetBeans.
That's not the idea, but I find the speed of the harddisk to be
particularly noticeable in this tool (now wait 'till I get some real
data for that route planning application....).

The discussion is relevant for any combination of application and OS that
necessitates disk activity, particularly memory swapping and disk paging.

The multi-core and RAM recommendations apply also. You want plenty of memory
and plenty of Level 1 and 2 cache. Memory speeds are another limiting factor
particularly in multi-tasking, even more in windowed platforms.
Multiprocessing OSes split tasks reasonably well, usually, so overall
throughput goes up, especially with headless (no video interaction) processes.

I use NetBeans, Glassfish and Postgres under Ubuntu Linux. A four-core Intel
64 box with 4GB RAM that I bought on sale runs the servers reasonably well.
It has large SATA drives that provide good throughput for a developer's
environment. I put NetBeans and the browser on a second computer, a
single-core AMD64 with 1GB RAM and IDE drives.

Running the servers on the same 1 GB single-CPU box as NetBeans and the
browser shows considerable performance degradation compared to the two-node
configuration.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Arne, I just reread my posts and realized that they could be offending.
That was certainly not the intend and I'm sorry if it came out that way.

I was not offended.

I don't think your posts were rude in any way.

And even if they were then it takes a lot to offend me.



Arne