Build Racing circa 2006

Found an old document where I’d written down some data on build timing and though it might be fun to share it.

Did some build racing of a fairly large codebase for a widely used macOS application from a company I was working for. Thought it might be fun to see the progression.

I loved the Quad G5 I bought for myself (employer wasn’t spending that kind of money) as an upgrade from the dual G5 I first bought. What an amazing jump in speed with the Quad G5! The intel based Macs were a significant jump in performance though and cheaper and sucked a lot less electricity (turning on the Quad G5 would trip my UPS about 50% of the time – it had a nasty initial surge).

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This is an ant build of {REDACTED}. Interestingly, the second build is faster
even though we do a clean before each build.. suggests our “clean” isn’t
really cleaning everything…? Maybe source file and system library caching in the file cache? Anyway, clearly not very carefully done, but amusing all the same. You can see why I didn’t work on my 17″ G4 laptop much – ouch!

Mac Mini 1.66 GHz core duo, 2G of RAM

1st build: 26 min 58 sec
2nd build: 25 min 6 sec

same machine but put source on an external firewire 400 drive:
remove objects directory (like 1st build):

3rd build: 30 min 4 sec
4th build: 27 min 10 sec

17″ Powerbook G4, 1.33 GHz, 1G RAM

1st build: 57 min 50 sec
2nd build: 55 min 26 sec

Dual G5 2Ghz, 1.5G RAM: (I think this hard drive must be fragmented or
something)

1st build: 22 minutes+
2nd build:

“Quad” G5 2.5GHz, 2.5G RAM:

1st build: 9 min 4 sec
2nd build: 8 min 16 sec

**WINNER *** (and it cost $800 less than the Quad G5!)
NEW Mac Pro (guessing: Dual 2.66GHz dual-core Xeon with 1G of RAM):

1st build: 8 min 4 sec
2nd build: 7 min 9 sec (+/-)