I have a MBP with 16GB of RAM. As projects grow in Xcode, the compile time does take longer. I'm looking into starting a hackintosh project purely for shortening Xcode compilation time. Since RAM is cheap, I wanna push the normal boundaries. But the biggest question is will Xcode be capable of using all the RAM greater than 32GB? I know there will be some diminishing marginal returns at some point of RAM increase.
RAM usage is mostly governed by the OS, because the Mac Pro does support up to 64GB of RAM, so should OSX (and by extension XCode).
Although I wonder if your compile time issues are actually RAM-related. I have Xcode projects that take minutes to build and it's all because my CPU is pegged at 100% (using a mid-2015 15" retina MBP). Not many software projects are RAM-constrained past 16GB.
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Planning on getting an 8gb ram laptop, at least 256gb ssd, with core i5(at least 8th gen) with financial management, I have seen post of some people saying 8gb ram is not enough to run intelliJ IDEA, some even say 16gb is just manageable and as I only intend to run just the ide before moving to android studio for building apps though I intend to get an android device for emulation alongside the android studio so I dont in any case use the virtual device, what do you guys suggest about getting the 8gb ram laptop, do you guys think the ssd can speed up my compilation without lagging or I should try to get a higher ram. Besides, I have a Lenovo thinkpad X140e mini laptop with 3gb ram, amd A4 series chip, 256gb HDD, and the laptop is so slow as it takes about 2 minutes to compile a simple println statement and after compiling about 5 codes, it might just freeze for more than 6 minutes, need help from experienced users and the time it takes to compile a code in the ide (those with the 8gb ram laptop and ssd)
I'm running windows 10 with 4GBs of DDR3 1066 on Intel second generation i5 mobile architecture.
I come from a OSX background mostly and memory has always been a concern for me because I prefer to have many tabs open. I noticed on OSX that the memory usage didn't relate that much to the performance of the applications so long as it wasn't fully saturated but easily on my iMac I can run 80% of memory and find no noticeable lag or stuttering. However on Windows I'm finding memory to be the major bottleneck in my system, I understand that upgrading to 8 or 16GBs of memory would be the upgrade path for me. However I would love to understand why my system slows down noticeably when I saturate 80% of the memory unlike OSX that seems to handle it just fine. Is it a bandwidth limitation? I know that Windows NT and Darwin are completely different Kernels and I would love to be educated in exactly how that affects the same usage scenario so differently.
Thank you in advance.
Curious if anyone out there is doing Android Studio development on a dual Xeon machine.
I would like to know if the additional CPU gave a dramatic or visible (50% or more) boost in build performance.
You probably found out, but for others wondering: Chances are - it won't.
Did some testing with two relatively quick E2650 v4 Xeons on a largish Java + Kotlin project and Xeons were considerably slower than low core count / higher clock CPU's.
Check out the benchmarks here:
https://superuser.com/questions/1115206/will-dual-xeons-improve-android-studio-build-times/
I have tried to measure speed of Android Studio 3.1.4 on the same hardware: Macbook Pro 2011, RAM 4Gb, SSD 240GB Samsung, Core i5 2.4Ghz.
I have installed on this machine 3 different OS: Windows 10, MacOS Hight Sierra 10.13, Ubuntu 18.04.
Avarage build time (running command: gradlew clean build, gradlew clean assembleRelease) on MacOS/Ubuntu was around 30% faster than on Windows.
On my another working machine: Core i5 3.0 Ghz 7400, RAM 16Gb, SSD 250Gb. Build time takes 4.34min on Windows 10 machine.
The same project on a little bit slower processor, but with the same RAM and SSD and it is running Ubuntu 16.04 build time takes two times faster!!
Well I was shocked with results, but still I choose Windows as development machine, because it's much more comfortable for me to use comfortable and
usable keyboard and sotfware than on Unix like systems. And even if I had to choose between MacOS and Ubuntu - mac is really much easier to setup everything, and
Ubuntu is too complex to use for usual people. Choise is up to you.
When building a project, I can see Xcode working on 4 Swift files at the same time in the Build Log inside the report navigator.
I also see that there are 4 processes in Activity Manager, all called "Swift", when it's compiling.
It seems to be doing a great use of the available processing power to do it's job, so I'm not looking to change that. However, i'm working with a Dual Core i7 processor.
Would a Quad Core i7 be able to compile 8 files in parallel? And if so, would it also scale up if it were 6 cores?
Could someone with at least a Quad Core do a test to confirm this?
I'm using Xcode 6.3.1
Thank you!
Xcode will use as many available processors as it can. There are some situations where it cannot use all processors, for example it cannot compile Objective-C files until all precompiled header files are compiled, so if you have one precompiled header file only, then only one processor will be used for that. But for all your normal source files, all the processors will be used. And for the static analyzer, all the processors will be used as well.
In other words, the quad core Retina MBP 15" is a very fine development machine. Give it lots of RAM if you have large source files, I had problems with 8 core MacPro with 4GB of RAM (long time ago). An older Mac Mini with four cores is also quite useful.
This is the CPU Usage on my MacBook Pro with the Apple M1 Pro during the normal thinking-typing-thinking-typing work that takes up 99% of my work day. The two cores on the left are the efficiency cores and the 8 on the right are the performance cores. It spends most of its time just like that. And there are a dozen apps open.
And when it’s time to see if that thinking-typing amounted to anything it’s nice to see all 10 cores max out while the app builds. That’s cool.
I wrote a program with xcode (using portaudio) on a MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz). The Release works without problem (clear audio streaming) and the CPU Usage Level is almost 90%.
The problem arises when i run the Release on a Mac Pro (Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz). The audio stream, when there is a large amount of computation, isn't clear (there are little clicks) despite the use of the CPU is four times lower than the one of MacBook Pro.
I can not understand why this happens.
25% CPU usage in a 4 core system means one core is 100% loaded. Also, I assume the Xeons are Pentium4 Xeons, which have way worse CPU cores than the Core2Duo, even though the clock frequency is a bit higher...