what machine best for development?

[Steve Green]

This is a hardware question.

I use Eclipse and Netbeans. Eclipse more than Netbeans but if I try to build
a J2EE (EJB) App I may switch over to Netbeans because of the integration
with Sun's App server.

Anyway the point to my post. My machine has 256meg of ram and seems to swap
like crazy at times. It messes with my programming rhythm. I have been
considering getting a new notebook (I prefer notebooks to desktop machines)
Do you find that 512meg is enough or should I go for a gig? I am leaning
toward a gig, but may save some money if I can.

Any thoughts on hardware for java development would be appreciated.

Steve

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

This is a hardware question.

I use Eclipse and Netbeans. Eclipse more than Netbeans but if I try to build
a J2EE (EJB) App I may switch over to Netbeans because of the integration
with Sun's App server.

Anyway the point to my post. My machine has 256meg of ram and seems to swap
like crazy at times. It messes with my programming rhythm. I have been
considering getting a new notebook (I prefer notebooks to desktop machines)
Do you find that 512meg is enough or should I go for a gig? I am leaning
toward a gig, but may save some money if I can.

Any thoughts on hardware for java development would be appreciated.

Steve

I think Mac OS X is great for Java development. It has all the usual
UNIX stuff plus lots of good debugging tools and a nice GUI.

Eclipse is a ridiculous memory hog. I have to give it a 750MB Java heap
for a 5000 class project. Even then it sometimes hits the infamous
build-that-never-finishes bug. Add in various native overheads and the
total RAM suckage is about 1GB. Now try to debug that big project...
I'll soon have to upgrade my machine from 1GB to 1.5GB so I can continue
working.

I hope that the Eclipse team starts slimming down their IDE rather than
cramming in more features. It's becoming difficult to use it for large
projects. I even have lots of features turned off to save memory.

 

[Alex Buell]

Anyway the point to my post. My machine has 256meg of ram and seems to swap
like crazy at times. It messes with my programming rhythm. I have been
considering getting a new notebook (I prefer notebooks to desktop machines)
Do you find that 512meg is enough or should I go for a gig? I am leaning
toward a gig, but may save some money if I can.

Get a gig, if possible. I'm on a 512 meg machine, and I find both
Eclipse and Netbeans eat a lot of memory. Oh, by the way, ditch
Windows. <g>

You could do well with the Dell Inspiron 9300, or the Dell Inspiron
XPS Gen 2. I'm saving up for a XPS myself, being a 8100 user.

Cheers,
Alex.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Kevin McMurtrie coughed up:

I think Mac OS X is great for Java development. It has all the usual
UNIX stuff plus lots of good debugging tools and a nice GUI.

Eclipse is a ridiculous memory hog. I have to give it a 750MB Java
heap for a 5000 class project.

That's a biiiiig project.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that big in java before, and I've been
in java since the begining. What do other ide's cost in memory for those
5000 classes, have you tried them?

And is this only at run-time? Just a quick off-the-top-of-my-head: There is
a common oversight in many folks code that uses StringBuffer (prior to 1.5)
and BufferedInputStreams in all revs, that allows for the underlying
character array in strings to stay enormous, even if the string itself is
small. This can eat up memory unnecessarily 100k at a whack or more, even
for innocuous strings.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

"Thomas G. Marshall"

Kevin McMurtrie coughed up:

That's a biiiiig project.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that big in java before, and I've been
in java since the begining. What do other ide's cost in memory for those
5000 classes, have you tried them?

Developers are using various IDEs and they seem to run fine on 1GB
machines. Yeah, it's a monster web application. Most classes are very
small, though.

And is this only at run-time? Just a quick off-the-top-of-my-head: There is
a common oversight in many folks code that uses StringBuffer (prior to 1.5)
and BufferedInputStreams in all revs, that allows for the underlying
character array in strings to stay enormous, even if the string itself is
small. This can eat up memory unnecessarily 100k at a whack or more, even
for innocuous strings.

At runtime? I'm not sure what you mean.

Yes, it could be String leftovers in Eclipse's parsers. That could
explain why Eclipse runs out of memory rapidly when changing core
classes but can run almost forever when changing peripheral classes.
I've been tempted to look at the Eclipse source code but open source
projects are usually horrifying to look at.

 

[steve]

This is a hardware question.

I use Eclipse and Netbeans. Eclipse more than Netbeans but if I try to build
a J2EE (EJB) App I may switch over to Netbeans because of the integration
with Sun's App server.

Anyway the point to my post. My machine has 256meg of ram and seems to swap
like crazy at times. It messes with my programming rhythm. I have been
considering getting a new notebook (I prefer notebooks to desktop machines)
Do you find that 512meg is enough or should I go for a gig? I am leaning
toward a gig, but may save some money if I can.

Any thoughts on hardware for java development would be appreciated.

Steve

im on a mac g4 1gb ram dual processor 1.42ghz. ( wonder what a g5 is like)

adaptec 39160 scsl & 3* segate st373307lw 68gb

with vpc 6 running to emulate windows ( me/98)


I can have the following open:

hogwasher
eclipse3.0 or jdeveloper10i
vpc 6,
itunes
safari
ireports 4.0, for report layout

yes all at the same time, and it is still a very fast environment for
development.

i have a g4 portable at work, and it is a piece of shit for development,
always swapping in and out


and i also use windows me for development ,but it drives me mad , with the
speed ) pent 4 1.?? ghz 700 mb ram


stay away from a portable for development.
get a desk top & slap in some SCSI to hide the swapping.



that said, if i run jdeveloper for over 4 hours without a reload, it drags
the system down to hell. and the window response goes to something like 5-10
seconds.



steve

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Kevin McMurtrie coughed up:

....[rip]...

Yes, it could be String leftovers in Eclipse's parsers. That could
explain why Eclipse runs out of memory rapidly when changing core
classes but can run almost forever when changing peripheral classes.
I've been tempted to look at the Eclipse source code but open source
projects are usually horrifying to look at.

Code grown an inch at a time is horrifying.

Code done by several people not sitting at one table is horrifying.

Code grown an inch at a time by several people not sitting at one table
defies description and makes Sin City look like Bambi.

'Course, eclipse could be the exception....


....[rip]...

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

steve coughed up:

im on a mac g4 1gb ram dual processor 1.42ghz. ( wonder what a g5 is
like)

adaptec 39160 scsl & 3* segate st373307lw 68gb

with vpc 6 running to emulate windows ( me/98)


I can have the following open:

hogwasher
eclipse3.0 or jdeveloper10i
vpc 6,
itunes
safari
ireports 4.0, for report layout

yes all at the same time, and it is still a very fast environment for
development.

i have a g4 portable at work, and it is a piece of shit for
development, always swapping in and out


and i also use windows me

STOP RIGHT THERE. I wouldn't use windows me for notepad text editing. I've
had to deal with it several times. It is a disaster that MS is desperately
trying to forget. Benchmark after benchmark shows that windows 98se is a
far superior beast.

But if you're on a 4+ GHz pent, then you should be on XP or at the very
least windows 2000.

If you *must* be on an earlier os, then make it 98se.

 

[Joona I Palaste]

Get a gig, if possible. I'm on a 512 meg machine, and I find both
Eclipse and Netbeans eat a lot of memory. Oh, by the way, ditch
Windows. <g>

You could do well with the Dell Inspiron 9300, or the Dell Inspiron
XPS Gen 2. I'm saving up for a XPS myself, being a 8100 user.

Go for a gig. My desktop, in its shiny black aluminium case, has a gig
of memory, and although it has no trouble building our 300-class web
application from scratch, the used memory counter still stays pretty
high. I'd have bought a computer with two or four gigs if I could have
afforded it.

 

[knightowl]

I have a P4-3G I bought a while ago. 2 Gigs of Memory running Windows
XP. What I really like about my desktop is it has a triple monitor
setup. Full screen windows everywhere.

if I was developing on a Laptop I'd see if I could get the Gig, and
then use Vern or something like that for Windows as a desktop manager.

HFC

 

[Dimitri Maziuk]

Kevin McMurtrie sez:

....
I think Mac OS X is great for Java development. It has all the usual
UNIX stuff plus lots of good debugging tools and a nice GUI.

I've a 512M PowerBook with basically just Netbeans and KMail
open all the time (plus an xterm and calendar sometimes) and
it's constantly swapping. Plus, there's no 1.5 JDK and I have
to manually add path to API docs to *every* project if I want
the docs in autocompletion popup.

Maybe a dual G5 with 1 gig can handle an IDE and an e-mail
client, but if it was my money I'd go for an athlon with
Linux/KDE: it'll be cheaper, faster, and way more usable.

(Hell, with OS X you get a cursor that you can only see on a
pure-white background and you have to pay $10 to some nagware
company just to get a visible one. Ditto for left-handed mouse
with > 1 buttons, virtual desktops, and anything unix had since
at least fvwm2.)

Dima

 

[Steve Green]

Eclipse and Netbeans eat a lot of memory. Oh, by the way, ditch

Windows. <g>

You could do well with the Dell Inspiron 9300, or the Dell Inspiron
XPS Gen 2. I'm saving up for a XPS myself, being a 8100 user.

I run a dual boot machine. I run XP and Mandrake Linux. Usually I do my
development in linux, but I did an upgrade of XP from home to professional
and that messed up my linux partitions a little. I would make a lousy PC
Support guy, I've just been using XP instead of fixing my partition mapping.

As for the Dell machines I have leaned away from them. The Dell machine I
was interested in was discontinued for some reason ... it was probably
eating sales away from the 9300 or XPS.

 

[Betty]

This is a hardware question.

I use Eclipse and Netbeans. Eclipse more than Netbeans but if I try to build
a J2EE (EJB) App I may switch over to Netbeans because of the integration
with Sun's App server.

Anyway the point to my post. My machine has 256meg of ram and seems to swap
like crazy at times. It messes with my programming rhythm. I have been
considering getting a new notebook (I prefer notebooks to desktop machines)
Do you find that 512meg is enough or should I go for a gig? I am leaning
toward a gig, but may save some money if I can.

Any thoughts on hardware for java development would be appreciated.

Steve,
I got a dell Inspiron 1100 with Celeron 2.0GHz CPU,
256MB and XP pro, and it was slow.
I got a 512MB memory card to replace one of the
128MB cards, so now I have 640MB and eclipse is MUCH
faster. Occasionally it has a pause if it has a lot of
work to do so I would recommend the 1GB. BTW: 512MB is now the
suggested minimum for XP.

 

[Steve Green]

This is a hardware question.

I use Eclipse and Netbeans. Eclipse more than Netbeans but if I try to
build a J2EE (EJB) App I may switch over to Netbeans because of the
integration with Sun's App server.

Anyway the point to my post. My machine has 256meg of ram and seems to
swap like crazy at times. It messes with my programming rhythm. I have
been considering getting a new notebook (I prefer notebooks to desktop
machines) Do you find that 512meg is enough or should I go for a gig? I am
leaning toward a gig, but may save some money if I can.

Any thoughts on hardware for java development would be appreciated.

Steve

Well I hated to spend the money, but I decided on my new notebook and just
placed an order for it. I got a notebook with 1gig as one DIMM so I would
have room for expansion down the road. Hopefully I will be able to run
Eclipse, Several Browsers, MagicDraw all at the same time without swapping.
Thanks everyone for your input it made commiting to 1gig a little easier.
--Steve

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Steve Green coughed up:

Well I hated to spend the money, but I decided on my new notebook and
just placed an order for it. I got a notebook with 1gig as one DIMM
so I would have room for expansion down the road. Hopefully I will be
able to run Eclipse, Several Browsers, MagicDraw all at the same time
without swapping. Thanks everyone for your input it made commiting to
1gig a little easier. --Steve

Here's the thing about future expansion.

I've /rarely/ seen it a big deal getting 1 dim over 2, only because by the
time you are likely to want to expand (assuming that it isn't right away),
the cost of the memory will have fallen so through the floor that it is just
as cheap to throw away both dims for the new memory.

 

[Tim Ward]

Well I hated to spend the money, but I decided on my new notebook and just
placed an order for it. I got a notebook with 1gig as one DIMM so I would
have room for expansion down the road. Hopefully I will be able to run
Eclipse, Several Browsers, MagicDraw all at the same time without swapping.
Thanks everyone for your input it made commiting to 1gig a little easier.

Or you could have switched to C++ and found 128M plenty.

 

[Steve Green]

Well I hated to spend the money, but I decided on my new notebook and

Here's the thing about future expansion.

I've /rarely/ seen it a big deal getting 1 dim over 2, only because by the
time you are likely to want to expand (assuming that it isn't right away),
the cost of the memory will have fallen so through the floor that it is
just as cheap to throw away both dims for the new memory.

Well in the case of the machine I bought the single DIMM only cost me 38usd
more than 1gig as 2x512 DIMMs. I thought that would be an Ok trade-off.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Steve Green coughed up:

Well in the case of the machine I bought the single DIMM only cost me
38usd more than 1gig as 2x512 DIMMs. I thought that would be an Ok
trade-off.

Oh that's more than sensible---ignore my prior post. Sometimes, depending
on the phase of their particular moon, and I don't understand this entirely,
it can be much more.

Also, I actually in *one* case found it cheaper on their site to order the 1
dimm (and the 2 was more expensive.) {chuckle}

 

[Steve Green]

Or you could have switched to C++ and found 128M plenty.

Well I really don't want to do C++. I have done that in the past and even
with the tools swapping I beleive I am more productive with Java than I am
with C++.

 

[Steve Green]

im on a mac g4 1gb ram dual processor 1.42ghz. ( wonder what a g5 is like)

adaptec 39160 scsl & 3* segate st373307lw 68gb

with vpc 6 running to emulate windows ( me/98)


I can have the following open:

hogwasher
eclipse3.0 or jdeveloper10i
vpc 6,
itunes
safari
ireports 4.0, for report layout

yes all at the same time, and it is still a very fast environment for
development.

stay away from a portable for development.
get a desk top & slap in some SCSI to hide the swapping.

I just don't have enough courage to buy a mac. If I was a graphic artist I
might. I like them don't get me wrong, but I want a machine to run MSWord
and the occasional game.

I also run Linux on a dual boot, this is what I usually do my development
on. My distro renamed itself ... I hate the new name, Mandrake sounded
better.

Dispite your better advice I purchased another notebook. I like the fact
that I can travel with it on occasion. The processor is an upgrade from my
P3 and the ram is a big jump; if it were not for the swapping I think the P3
was fast enough. I think the right notebook can be close to a desktop. The
notebook I puchased is billed as a desktop replacement _ I will see how true
that is soon enough.
--Steve