On 08/29/2017 08:09 PM, R0b0t1 wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 12:07 AM, Dale <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Rich Freeman wrote:
>>
>> Isn't it amazing how efficient and fast newer computers are? It's
>> almost worth the energy saving to upgrade. If a person runs their
>> system 24/7, that is even more reason.
>>
>
> It's something I used to bring up in #gentoo when people would come in
> and ask or complain about compilation times. The amortization period
> for computers is generally 3 years. If you use them longer, you are
> (in theory) losing money relative to your competitors.
>
> As a home user, your time and energy budgets might not be so tight,
> but the lack of stress is worth a nice desktop for compiling your
> software.
>
>
I'm sort of on the fence for now. I bought my computer in 2008 (but an
expensive processor, QX9650, with 8GB of RAM, very $$$ in 2008) and it
still is running fine today. It still compiles reasonably quickly, as I
use distcc with one other computer) and am still on spinning rust, but
in RAID. My mythtv frontends have SSDs and every one has had the SSD
replaced at least once.
My main frontend in the living room has shown problems (hanging while
playing back recordings, and I mean a hard-lock... no ssh, no response
at all, and the backend had in its logs "where'd it go? closing
connection") and so I think the hardware may finally be at the end of
its life. That was also built in 2008.
I'm not going to throw a working computer out (well, recycle it) if I
don't have to. Power is cheap here.
I have concerns about the backend (Q6600) and frontend (E7500), as they
were both built in 2008, but the thing is, they're just as fast as I
remember them when built new.
For the frontend replacement I think I'm going to jump to one of the
Ryzen products. I don't need ThreadRipper there, but one of their other
processors will work. The backend will get a faster processor but it's
part of my distcc cluster.
I think Dale posted a libreoffice build speed, mine isn't so bad either,
but I'm using RAID and distcc:
$ genlop -t libreoffice
* app-office/libreoffice
Tue Aug 1 08:45:28 2017 >>> app-office/libreoffice-5.2.7.2
merge time: 1 hour, 22 minutes and 53 seconds.
I *really* hate the climate nowadays of toss it out when it acts up/gets
slow.
Dan
