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PowerBook Performance for Java Development?
brasten wants to get to the core of this issue: "I'm in the market for a new development notebook. I would like to jump into the Apple world and pick up a PowerBook. However, compiling very large Java applications of course takes some time, and so raw processing speed is a factor. I have been unable to find solid data on how fast a 1.33GHz PowerBook runs against the modern x86-based notebooks. Does anybody have any information that could help me compare?"
The G4 can't win the battle against modern x86 processors anymore.
But on the other side, how often do you compile a whole project? While you develop, there are mostly only very few files changed. Compiling them then is only a matter of seconds. On every platform.
The much more important question is, if Mac OS X and the applications can speed up your developing process? If you saved 10 seconds by faster editing the source files, you can spent 5 seconds for the longer compilation time and save 5 seconds for your personal recreation ;)
Depending on the complexity of your project, you will occasionally, and maybe even quite often, need to do full rebuilds. The java compiler is not always clever enough to figure out which classes it needs to change, sometimes things just don't seem to work and a full rebuild fixes it.
Also, if you change a class that's used by a lot of other classes (eg your Constants class?) it will have to recompile all those classes again. If you're trying to live off your programming, you want things to get done quickly, and you want to avoid sitting around for a few minutes waiting for the rebuild to complete. That makes compilation speed very important.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I have found that running Linux on a 333mhz G3 runs a hell of a lot faster than OS9 on the same G3. Its also faster than Linux running on a x86 of the same speed.
The core of OSX is based on Darwin/BSD and as such I would expect similar speed improvements, but you'd better make sure that you get a powerbook with a nippy GPU because the GUI might mask the true speed of whats going on under the hood.
I'd go with the powerbook, they are lovely machines, I cant wait till I can afford one, all that unixy goodness in such a small package, and having apps such as iMovie etc, it would also be a fun purchase.
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and since the original question was regarding a laptop, the G5 can't really enter into it, seeing as how it's not yet in use in the powerbooks.
You don't need Geeksintraining if you're on Slashdot.
Ugh, this is horrible advice. The fastest computer of tomorrow won't help with the work you need done today. If you need a new machine now, buy it now, else you'll always be playing waiting game.
"I do most of my engineering on my PowerBook," James Gosling states flatly. "I find it dramatically more efficient than a desktop system because, on one hand, it has all the power of a full-blown UNIX desktop. On the other hand, I can take it with me because it has all of the laptop stuff. I can work on a airplane, at home, in a corner when I'm sitting in a boring meeting. And it's able to do not just email and browsing, it's got fully-functional, high-end software development tools."
Powerbooks are now shipping with a 5400 rpm drive option availbale (as opposed to the painfully slow 4500 rpm drives standard). Hitachi has begun shipping a 7200 rpm (standard desktop rpm) drive for notebooks. My new PowerBook is being ordered, but the first thing I'm doing with it is putting in a new 7200 rpm drive to remove this limitation. slow drives have hampered Powerbooks for a long time, but the 5400 option and the ability to put in a 7200 rpm drive shuold make things "much better now". I'm looking forward to drooling after the disaster that was the TiBooks is finally over.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
You are generally right, but just think that in early January 1999 you bought yourself a beige PowerMac G3. Next week Apple introduced the blue&white G3. Should you wait just a week longer, you'd end up with a much better machine, Panther-compatible. Sometimes the next model in the product line is just a minor upgrade. There is no reason to kick yourself if you bought an iBook 800 in late 2002. Its replacement was essentially the same machine with CPU speed bumped up by 100 MHz. But sometimes the next model is actually a quantum leap in performance. If you bought an iBook 600 in early 2002, it was a bad deal - if you'd wait just a week, you could get a machine with better graphics chip (thus supported by Quartz Extreme, and therefore getting all the nice bells & whistles like the Expose). The art of Mac shopping is the art of predicting those quantum leaps - and avoiding getting stuck on the wrong side. I guess such a quantum leap is imminent in the professional portable range (it already happened with the iBooks).
My new PowerBook is being ordered, but the first thing I'm doing with it is putting in a new 7200 rpm drive to remove this limitation.
Uh... dude? Hate to break it to you, but the hard drives aren't customer-replaceable in the aluminum PowerBooks. Seriously: you can't get at it. Can't get there from here. And if you try, even if you succeed, your one-year warranty and all future AppleCare go poof and disappear in little puffs of blue smoke.
Just get the 5400 and forget it.
Thing is... it's hardly ever true that you need a new machine now. What's really true is that a new machine now would be nice, and a new machine tomorrow would be good, and a new machine by next month is a fairly big deal, and a new machine by next year is essential. It's a rising curve: necessity increases with time, you see.
The price-performance value curve increases with time... but it doesn't do so steadily. It's punctuated by new product releases. The best time to buy is right after a "speed bump" release. If you buy a new machine that's significantly different from the previous generation, you run the risk of uncovering previously unknown flaws in the design. But if you take a tried-and-true design and buy the "rev B" model, you're pretty much assured a good experience.
So the best advice is to wait as long as you can until the right circumstances come along. Don't just wander into the Apple Store and plop down your credit card without scoping out the landscape first.
Nor can the fastest x86 chips, as the heat issues are presenting a formidible speed barrier with both Intel and AMD chips on laptops. The new "Centrino" mobile CPU from Intel probably does not shine all that brightly when compared to a G4, but I would want to see test scores before making that call.
anyone got a solution under Panther so that I can justify to carry a PB around?
Having JDK1.4.2 is great but the lack of J2ME 2 is more and more like missing a limb now, and the pain is growing each day.
--
"The problem of standard is there are too many of them."
My advice is to buy now AND wait for the second revision of the G5. It will be a much nicer wait if you have a powerbook on your lap.
I'm a full-time developer, whose Java work typically pays the bills. I have a 1GHz Powerbook that I use; it's the only real UI-friendly computer I even turn on these days (the servers at clients' sites & in my closet don't count). I do all my day-to-day development on my Powerbook, with a CVS server running elsewhere that does the "official" builds, backups, etc etc.
:) Full graphical Java applications run fast, Java Web Start is built in, and the OS ships with a built-in Java Application Server, JBoss. The only downer is that JVM releases typically lag Sun by 4 - 6 months, but that's acceptable in my mind; it takes that long to shake the "D'oh!" bugs out of a VM anyway.
Overall, I've never noticed a performance problem when compiling large applications. As a barometer, I just did an "ant clobber dist" on a current project (around 200 classes, plus 50 JSP pages, etc etc), and it built a distributable in 18 seconds. Not too shabby. Overall, Java compiler performance shouldn't be a concern in purchasing a laptop; if your build takes too long, it's more likely the fault of a poor build process than a slow compiler!
Anyway, Java integration into Mac OS X is the best in the industry. It's amazing -- Apple's OS is more Java-aware than Sun's
Finally, if you're going to do lots of development at a desk, I'd also strongly recommend plunking down the $2K for an Apple Flatscreen. Yeah yeah, it's expensive... but you'll be more productive with a great external monitor. And if you're going to be buying that much hardware, you might as well look into joining the Apple Developer Connection, as you might be able to get 12 - 20 % off of hardware purchases (especially if you can claim Student status somehow).
HTH,
--Mid
That's simply not true. Dell offers a 15" widescreen (1400x1080 pixel or 1920x1200) display notebook with a Radeon 9600, 40GB HDD, 256M DDR, Pentium-M 1.4Ghz, and a DVD combo drive for around $1500. For under $2000 you can get a 2x DVD burner and the super high res screen, plus a Pentium-M 1.8Ghz, 80gb HDD, and 512M DDR.
The comparable 15" PowerBook has a lower resolution screen and *starts* at $2000, with a slower CPU (1GHz, and Pentium-M has higher IPC in most cases compared to G4), less memory, no DVD burner, and a smaller drive (60gb). Both notebooks have integratrd WiFi, both have good battery life (nearly five hours), both have FireWire and S-video out. The PC has USB 2.0 and PCMCIA. The PowerBook has FireWire 800, 802.11g (as opposed to b), and that nifty lighted keyboard.
Gateway has a decent 17" notebook for $1400. A 17" PowerBook *starts* at over $2500.
The iBook G4 is $1100. For $800, I got a smaller, lighter notebook (Averatech 3150P; 4.3lbs) with the same buit in DVD combo drive, same 12" XGA screen, larger 40gb HDD, integrated 802.11b, USB 2.0, 256M DDR memory, and Windows XP Pro.
Look, the real answer is that of course, even for very, very large Java projects, a newish G4 PowerBook is going to be fast enough.
You might be able to find a P4 laptop you can cook an egg on and might also compile your app a little faster, but what is it going to save you, really? 3 seconds per compile, if that?
When developing, if you're any good at all, you spend the bulk of your time writing code, not compiling it. If you're not very good, most of your time is still spent fixing errors reported by the compiler, or debugging code, and so maybe the debugger is where you should be asking performance questions.
Either way, deciding if you should get a Pentium or G4 based on compiler performance when what you're doing is writing code is somewhat like asking if you should get a Dodge or a Honda based on horsepower when what you're doing is driving a couple of miles to work... I mean, it's very likely that *other* factors are more important, like ease-of-use, target deployment platform, what you'd rather be spending your time/money on, preferred editor/IDE, etc... and in the long run, either one will do the job. Of course, my answer is don't send money to Microsoft, they have plenty.
I wouldn't put much faith in that. They're benchmarks submitted by individual users. Take a look at the computer info. You have single Athlon 1700's outperforming dual 2200+'s. I'm sure the result would be a very different story in a controlled environment.
Building BeanShell on my 17" 1Ghz powerbook is faster than on my sparc ultra 60.
But, forget about speed, you'll love the PowerBook.
I've pretty much migrated all my Java development to it without even noticing... It's just a nice platform.
Pat Niemeyer
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates and the BeanShell Java scirpting language.
With the better memory bus in the new machines, I guess that the 1.25/1.33 GHz ALBooks should come close to a 2GHz P4. In other words, they are plenty fast enough for at least medium sized projects (and if you use a reasonably smart development environment, e.g. make, you rarely compile a lot of stuff in one go anyways.
For me, I'm very happy with my machine. It's not the pure performance, but rather the whole package. It is actually a pleasure to just sit there and type away on the keyboard. And I'm using it mostly under X11/Fink, so it is not attribuatable to the OS (although MacOS-X is farly good), it is purely due to the nice materials and reasonably ergonomic design.
Stephan
Ugh, this is horrible advice. The fastest computer of tomorrow won't help with the work you need done today. If you need a new machine now, buy it now, else you'll always be playing waiting game.
"If you can wait- wait" is not horrible advice. "Don't buy an apple portable now whatever you do" would be horrible advice.