On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Helge Hafting wrote:
Does anyone know roughly how long it takes to build LyX on a machine
with one of these processors:
* Core 2 Duo E4300
* AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+
* AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 (or BE-2350)
Actually, my plan is to install one or more virtual machines in it and
Hm - virtualization tends to slow things down - why bother?
Best reason: I'd like some practical experience with VMs.
Initial reason: I'm thinking of setting up several VMs with different
Linux distributions. Then it might be possible to automate build tests
and/or unit tests on them, and perhaps also on windows. I wouldn't run all
these additional VMs at once, but cycle through them.
Performance: The machine will be my PVR, I don't want LyX compilations to
interfere with that. Reserving a core for the PVR ensure this, and its
better to reserve just a core compared to use a separate machine...
Security: I've gotten a bit of security paranoia from a friend who's a
systems administrator:-)
So, going back to my original question, does anyone have an estimate of
the build time with these?
A somewhat related question: Is a quad core an advantage when it comes to
building LyX? Is the linking stage multi-threaded?
I don't know about LyX in particular, but compiling can generally take
advantage of many cores.
Yes, I know about 'make -j', but I'm wondering in particular about the
linking stage...
Anyway, this is all rather difficult so I'm going to settle for
approximations by compiling LyX on some hardware, see how long that takes
and extrapolate to what I might expect. As long as compilations are
quicker than some reasonable value I'll be happy.
/Christian
PS. Another alternative might be to use several machines and 'distcc',
which basically distributes the compilation tasks across many machines.
AFAI, this doesn't help with the link stage, the machines must have the
same version of gcc and security is ... so-so.
--
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44 http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
