How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old computer

Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by motters on Monday August 22, 2011 @07:23AM (#2912113)

I've used this strategy for a long time, mainly because the target platforms were often low powered PCs or DSPs. At one one company which I worked for not so long ago I was asked on a few occasions whether I wanted a newer PC, and I repeatedly said "no".

I'm not advocating luddism, but if you use a computer which is a few years old and make some dumb mistakes then the performance penalty is big and immediately obvious at the development stage, whereas on the latest hardware with multiple CPU cores it might not be so obvious and then turns into a crisis during deployment.

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by leon_ on Monday August 22, 2011 @07:56AM (#2912160)

Also watch out for that SSD sitting in your machine making file access "free". :)

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by pornel on Monday August 22, 2011 @08:53AM (#2912272)

Is there a tool to slow down disk access?

I'm especially worried about UI thread getting blocked on file access to sleeping HDD or unreliable network drive (i.e. I don't want my applications to be as beachball-death-prone as Finder and iTunes)

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by shabble on Monday August 22, 2011 @01:25PM (#2913219)

Maybe use an actual network filesystem (NFS/Samba/whatever), and then throttle/shape the network traffic however you like (lots of suggestions upthread).

You could probably do it over a loopback device on the same machine if you don't have a network handy.

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by pavel_lishin on Monday August 22, 2011 @09:06PM (#2914859)

This has done wonders to show me just how buggy iTunes is, simply by trying to store all of my media on a remote machine.

Hm, I should add these mp3s to my library. Drag, drop, make coffee, hit the bathroom, chat with the QA guy, come back, read some HN comments, hey, it's done.

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by maximilianburke on Monday August 22, 2011 @11:28AM (#2912753)

Can you move IO onto another thread, or use asynchronous/non-blocking methods? Blocking IO should never be done on your UI thread.

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by pornel on Monday August 22, 2011 @02:57PM (#2913617)

That's what I'd like to do, but there are non-obvious cases that I could have missed, e.g. seemingly innocent system calls, observers/event callbacks.

Also, when you make I/O truly async, you need to ensure UI behaves sanely while slow I/O happens in the background.

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by may on Monday August 22, 2011 @12:23PM (#2912960)

Use a USB stick?

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by simcop2387 on Monday August 22, 2011 @01:57PM (#2913359)

In this same thinking there are still some USB 1.1 hubs out there too. This should give you a VERY slow drive for a decent price. As an example:

http://www.amazon.com/Ho97958-Usb-1-1-Slim-4-Port/dp/B00030N...

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Re:How to Improve the quality of your software: find an old ... by pornel on Monday August 22, 2011 @02:58PM (#2913623)

OS is too good at caching reads, so tests are not repeatable.

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