{"id":178,"date":"2007-10-11T15:48:19","date_gmt":"2007-10-11T19:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2007-10-11\/do-i-want-a-mac-pro\/"},"modified":"2007-10-11T15:48:19","modified_gmt":"2007-10-11T19:48:19","slug":"do-i-want-a-mac-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2007-10-11\/do-i-want-a-mac-pro\/","title":{"rendered":"Do I Want a Mac Pro?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I need to reconfigure the computers on my desk somehow, and I don&#8217;t really know that much about hardware. I <em>think<\/eM> I want to ask Mozilla for a beefy Mac Pro, but I wanted to get opinions from my knowledgable readers first.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Currently I have three computers on my desk (see the chart below). I don&#8217;t think I need three any more, now that I know and love VMWare. I&#8217;d really prefer to have a single desktop and a laptop. I might keep and reimage the Linux machine for a stable performance-testing machine.\n<li>I&#8217;d like to be able to do builds on all three major platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS) on both machines&#8230; this pretty much means that I need a Mac host machine, right?\n<li>Some of the mozilla2 automated-rewrite work is very processor-intensive, and it would be really nice to have more than two cores available for it.\n<li>I&#8217;m considering returning the Dell machine to Mozilla and asking for a Mac Pro with 4-8 cores and a fair amount of memory. But I&#8217;m concerned that I might be limited by the standard 7200RPM disks. Is that a valid concern?\n<li>For some reason, compiling on the Windows box is really slow. I&#8217;ve done all the ordinary stuff like turn off virus scanners, but it still seems unreasonably slow to compile for such a fast machine. I suspect there&#8217;s some I\/O problem, but I can&#8217;t figure it out. It&#8217;s faster to compile in a VM on that machine than on the host OS. Also, is Windows capable of using the full 4G for standard applications? While I&#8217;m figuring out what to do, should I at least install Linux as the host OS on that machine?\n<li>What&#8217;s the best way to add a super-fast disk to the Macbook Pro? Preferably something portable enough that I can take it with me while traveling.\n<\/ul>\n<p>Random related question: are VMWare shared folders a lot slower on a Windows guest than a Linux guest? I&#8217;ve been using shared folders in VMWare Fusion to share a single mozilla source directory between multiple VMs, and this works really well with Linux guests and very poorly with Windows guests.<\/p>\n<table border=\"1\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"2\">\n<tr>\n<td>Type<\/p>\n<td>Processor(s)<\/p>\n<td>RAM<\/p>\n<td>Disk<\/p>\n<td>Current OS<\/p>\n<tr>\n<td>Desktop &#8211; custom-built<\/p>\n<td>Athlon64 3200+<\/p>\n<td>1G<\/p>\n<td>WD Caviar &#8211; 200GB 7200RPM<\/p>\n<td>Linux &#8211; FC4<\/p>\n<tr>\n<td>Desktop &#8211; Dell Dimension 9100<\/p>\n<td>Pentium D &#8211; 3Ghz (dual core)<\/p>\n<td>4G<\/p>\n<td>WD Caviar &#8211; 250GB &#8211; 7200RPM<\/p>\n<td>Windows XP<\/p>\n<tr>\n<td>Laptop &#8211; Macbook Pro 15&#8243;<\/p>\n<td>Core 2 Duo<\/p>\n<td>2G<\/p>\n<td>100G 7200RPM<\/p>\n<td>MacOS10.4<br \/>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I need to reconfigure the computers on my desk somehow, and I don&#8217;t really know that much about hardware. I think I want to ask Mozilla for a beefy Mac Pro, but I wanted to get opinions from my knowledgable readers first. Currently I have three computers on my desk (see the chart below). I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mozilla","tag-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}