Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

Re:Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBoo... by vladvasiliu on Saturday December 30, 2023 @01:34AM (#38813229)

Are you using a public cloud to host the dev boxen? Is compilation actually faster than locally – assuming that your pc's having been replaced to lower-specced versions since they don't do any heavy lifting anymore?

I work for a not-really-tech company (and I'm not a full-time dev either), so I've been issued a crappy "ultra-portable" laptop with an ultra-low-voltage CPU. I've looked into offloading my dev work to an AWS instance, but was quite surprised that it wasn't any faster than doing things locally for things like Rust compiles.

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Re:Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBoo... by spockz on Saturday December 30, 2023 @03:04AM (#38813561)

In our case it is mostly faster when provisioning a machine with significantly more cores. In cloud machines you get “vcores” which are not the same as a core on a local cpu.

I’ve been integrating psrecord into our builds to track core utilisation during the built and see that a lot of time is spent in single threaded activities. Effort is required to compile modules in parallel but that is actually quite straightforward. Running all tests in parallel is harder.

We get the most out of the cloud machines by being able to provision a 16+ core machine to run more complicated (resilience) tests and benchmarks.

Also note that typically the cloud machines run on lower clocked CPUs than you would find in a workstation depending on which machine you provision.

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