[ltp] Re: Best replacement for X61s

[Stefan Monnier]

> Hm I have done an analysis concerning start up, hibernating, shooting
> down on the machine, plus start up and performance of RAM hungry
> applications and the difference is considerable.

I (re)boot very rarely, and I similarly rarely hibernate (I just
suspend the machine instead).  As for startup of applications, both my
web browser and my Emacs are always running so they're part of the
"reboot time" (which includes logging in and doing various other
manipulations), which again is something that rarely affects me.

> I have not done the same for vanilla
>
>  latex foo.tex
>
> From the command line, although me impression is that it is faster.
>
> I have not run this test since I use latex only within emacs, in any
> case running latex requires some editor, and for that editor the
> difference will be noticeable, which makes me repeat: a SSD is a huge
> performance boost.

While I do have SSDs pretty much everywhere nowadays (I like their
silence), the speedup for everyday tasks is not that great in my
experience.  The main differences are for file-system heavy operations
(like apt-get) or when the disk was idle and you have to wait for it to
spin up.

Other than that, for my usual "edit + compile" operations, all the
programs and data should already be in cache so there is typically no
disk access other than writes and those are done asynchronously, so
their speed is mostly irrelevant.  E.g. on my projects, "make" typically
uses more than 90% of CPU time even with a very slow disk, so even an
infinitely fast disk would only ever be able to give me a 10% speed up.

An SSD can give a significant boost when you're low in RAM, tho (I used
one in a Fit-PC2 where the 1GB of RAM was really limiting for desktop
use).


        Stefan