tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post9174254839534748601..comments2019-10-31T20:23:33.252+00:00Comments on Folding Air, Software Development With Damian Stanger: How much does your slow machine cost your company?Damohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08902572365040420975noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-58973939605471551752012-11-21T12:29:03.426+00:002012-11-21T12:29:03.426+00:00The PC hanging is most likely because it is swappi...The PC hanging is most likely because it is swapping and nothing to do with the graphics card. I had a similar situation (with company not wanting to spend money), and adding a hardware RAM drive for the swap file noticeably helped so I'm sure an SSD would help even more. Ideally upgrade the RAM from 4GB to 8GB or more, but if like the writer you are on a 32 bit OS then that isn't really an option.Brian Cryerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03116870665853516042noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-50508562746422963832011-09-06T20:13:49.627+01:002011-09-06T20:13:49.627+01:00Great analysis and, whatever the figures, your poi...Great analysis and, whatever the figures, your point is well made. FWIW, I would use a fully-rolled-up cost of around £500 per day for a dev (includes overheads) and the TCO for a "desktop" (including those procurement, deployment and support costs, disposal, etc.) being in the region of £1500.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-37264865740958257922011-09-05T15:00:21.326+01:002011-09-05T15:00:21.326+01:00Did you try to measure how long it takes to get ba...Did you try to measure how long it takes to get back into flow after the interruptions that derail you and factor that in to productivity more broadly than just 'lost 5 minutes waiting'; it might be 'lost 5 minutes waiting, lost half an hour getting back to where we were before thoe five minutes)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-69628834520248272742011-09-05T14:15:07.942+01:002011-09-05T14:15:07.942+01:00I think it's even worse: the longer it takes t...I think it's even worse: the longer it takes to finish a task, the more likely a version-control conflict, and the worse it will be. So the actual price is more than doubled when the time doubles. And, on top of this, like you said, is the unmeasurable loss of flow, which is even more expensive in difficult projects than the measurable costs.Nero kattihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12781851369777623543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-19495382278689707282011-09-05T14:03:14.466+01:002011-09-05T14:03:14.466+01:00We see the same thing doing large scale Java web a...We see the same thing doing large scale Java web app on Ubuntu and/or Fedora with IntelliJ IDEA 10, on similar machines but with 8 GB RAM. We've bought a few quad core XEON machines with 12GB DDR3 RAM and 10k to 15k RPM SAS drives and the difference is staggering. Maven builds cut in half or better, IntelliJ doesn't sit around indexing forever, etc...<br /><br />The faster SAS drives seem to be the biggest bang for your buck in our experience - just have enough RAM to avoid swapping too.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16991583754273713402noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-81568735724648084652011-09-05T13:52:48.186+01:002011-09-05T13:52:48.186+01:00Hi Damian,
thanks for this post - it reminds mana...Hi Damian,<br /><br />thanks for this post - it reminds managers of their responsibility to design a system that works economically well.<br /><br />However, it looks to me as if your calculation contains two assumptions that are wrong.<br /><br />1) You write "Devs are the constraint on the throughput of the system (the bottleneck)." and then, you begin to calculate the daily cost per developer as £200. This is much too low because you use cost accounting instead of throughput accounting.<br /><br />Theory of Constraints says that a bottleneck is not a constraint for cost but a constraint for *throughput* of the system. So, let's change the accounting method: How large is your *throughput in pounds sterling* paid per release?<br /><br />Let's say you develop a medium sized application with your 10 developers. You release twice a year and (say) your customers pay £2 million per release. Now, what is the cost (in terms of lost throughput) if the developers get one hour behind schedule? The calculation works like this: One release = 6 months = 120 working days = 960 working hours. Your company loses £2 million / 960 hours = £2082 each hour on the bottleneck resource. If the developers really are your company's bottleneck and if you have 10 of them, each developer costs £208 per hour(!) in lost throughput.<br /><br />That was about assumption #1. (By the way: How do you know that the devs are the bottleneck and not somebody else, e.g. testers?)<br /><br />Now for the other assumption:<br /><br />2) You say "That's 10 people losing 40 mins a day, so 400 minutes a day of lost development effort.". That is the right answer to the wrong problem. You point out how much capacity your developers lose because of slow machines. If your developers were a motorway, this would translate to "lost square miles for cars". But: The real problem on a motorway is not "how many cars can you place on it?" but "how many cars can move on it per hour?" and "how long will each car spend in queues?".<br /><br />Let's translate that back to software development. Software development is a flow problem. If you allow your developers to use up the entire time of day for development, how much increase would you get in throughput? And, how much time does the work spend in queues? By how much can this queueing time be reduced by faster machines? How about limiting work in progress - could this have a higher impact than using faster machines?<br /><br />---<br /><br />From my point of view, you need to have more flow-oriented instead of capacity-oriented data to support your point of view that faster machines would be the solution. Continue to get that data and translate it (as you did) into money, then you're on the right track.<br /><br />Cheers<br />MatthiasAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-87627403854387402212011-09-05T13:22:37.428+01:002011-09-05T13:22:37.428+01:00I do admire your pursuit of the rational thought p...I do admire your pursuit of the rational thought process, but...<br /><br />There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.<br />It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity.<br />It is the middle ground between light and shadow,<br />between science and superstition,<br />and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.<br />This is the dimension of imagination.<br />It is an area which we call . . . the Corporate Purchasing Zone.<br /><br />The group that I am working in is experiencing much the same situation, we are on 32bit Win XP with a fleet of dell machines that have dodgy video drivers... Visual Studio dies at the drop of a hat... add in a well known global IT services company as the manager of desktop environment and it is a wonder anything gets done.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-24916782666487192412011-09-05T12:01:14.437+01:002011-09-05T12:01:14.437+01:00Posted by MikeCSH on: http://news.ycombinator.com/...Posted by MikeCSH on: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2960319<br /><br />I've actually done exactly this exercise myself having been constantly frustrated with the development platform in use at my company (Similar Dell PCs, Win 7, VS2010, RS6 etc.). Additionally we have a slow VPN to our servers which are hosted at our main office. There have been days where the total wasted time is >25% of my day.<br />I'd add an additional cost into the analysis which is the frustration of engineers working under these conditions and the risk of them leaving to find somewhere that takes this more seriously.<br />I'll also register my continued surprise and disappointment at the performance of this typical MS development stack on a machine that should be more than up to the task (3 GHZ Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM).Damohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08902572365040420975noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-39749715861297565242011-09-05T05:37:47.607+01:002011-09-05T05:37:47.607+01:00Hy
Nice to here this story. I'm working as con...Hy<br />Nice to here this story. I'm working as consultant for various customers and I always face performance problems at the customers site. Often our customers come from manufacturing or industry sector and the IT there doesn't see why developers would need better machines. I encouraged my team to do the stopwatch(ing) and the maths. When we had the numbers we got new machines in a relatively short time. We went from dual core, 4 gb RAM, IDE to i7 quad hyperthreading, 8gb RAM, intel SSD. We are now saving more than 50% runtime when running fxcop, unit tests and acceptance test. That rocks!<br /><br />Now we also need to improve the execution spped of our tests. We have a lot of potential there. And also our CI server and agents could benefit from SSDs<br /><br />Happy (fast) codingDaniel Marbachhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08223556328519007801noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-76041987505421944982011-09-04T23:03:29.962+01:002011-09-04T23:03:29.962+01:00Thanks for doing the arithmetic. I'm amazed at...Thanks for doing the arithmetic. I'm amazed at how many times I recommend this technique to clients and they choose not to do it. I measured the time a team lost fighting with ClearCase, and it averaged 15%, or roughly 6 hours per week per person.<br /><br />I also ask this of my clients: "If I could give you a last-second 10% extension on your project, would you take it?" They always say yes, but they don't spend the $5-10k it takes to get that extension. I release the outcome.J. B. Rainsbergerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16213943899864372362noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-67363100377834401962011-09-04T22:40:58.679+01:002011-09-04T22:40:58.679+01:00A good point of view. The problem is the subjectiv...A good point of view. The problem is the subjectivity of it, to do a study and able to demonstrate that gain. In terms of "managers in suit".Rafael Moreirahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05272202606670105024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-73709560400697810842011-09-04T22:14:33.651+01:002011-09-04T22:14:33.651+01:00Not to mention the affect on flow...Not to mention the affect on flow...ctfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05464902188219000642noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-74488205213257183532011-09-04T14:51:46.721+01:002011-09-04T14:51:46.721+01:00I did similar estimates latelty. In my country we ...I did similar estimates latelty. In my country we have similar stakes but in different currency (3-4x less in practice), thus it is even harder to convince anybody to invest in hardware(which is even more expensive here).<br /><br />I have similar configuration as you mentioned and it is best to invest in 2nd generation ssd drive (~300mb/s, for 3rd generation you would need to have sata 3 - 6gb/s), new workstation with ~i7 class CPU, 8gb ram and hdd would still hangs sometimes, which is never the case with ssd.Krzysiekhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03930625629870670860noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-80270198666076183752011-09-04T13:27:40.437+01:002011-09-04T13:27:40.437+01:00wow.you should outsource it.. to pricy for a team....wow.you should outsource it.. to pricy for a team...<br />Actually pc spec is good. pc hang because you don't have graphic card........ just that..<br />I wouldn't suggest the latest core i5 /i7 for development.core 2 duo is enough.more faster then lastest core i5.The reason less buss speed??hafizan azizhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00421008642183118026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8200285235757892384.post-20692567138668617762011-09-04T10:38:48.273+01:002011-09-04T10:38:48.273+01:00Staff get paid, jobs get done, new hardware costs ...Staff get paid, jobs get done, new hardware costs money -- based on my experience working in larger companies the solution would simply be to make your staff work 40 minutes longer per day or take 40 minutes less at lunch. Ignoring this and assuming staff time is fixed:<br /><br />You have to factor in a bunch of other items:<br /> * Machines are assets and need to be written off (+costs time)<br /> * Machines can't simply be thrown away; you have to pay to dispose of them (especially in corporate environments)<br /> * Machine's don't simply replace themselves, they have to be unpacked, set up, this is more time and money<br /> * Dev machines contain lots of small configurable things (visual studio, iis, svn, check outs, etc); setting up a new machine takes time -- if you pick similar hardware you could just clone the disk and hope windows deals with the new hardware (potential issue with windows licenses)<br /><br />The best hardware upgrade I ever did was switching up to an SSD; Considering these can be had for £150 each (for ~120GB) it'd be interesting to find out if your results are whittle down to IO latency or just sheer processing to determine if an SSD would be the solution.<br /><br />I've also seen situations where large companies weren't even using gigabit ethernet so this is also something to look into; especially if you're sat waiting for check ins etc.<br /><br />Finally; the last one -- which is usually the hardest -- is tweaking the end user and their behaviour; are there tasks that could be accomplished differently? in a different order? Could you farm off some tasks into automated systems such as a Continous integration server? etc etc.<br /><br />Anyway, nice article. I do this sort of stuff all the time for my own work, I'm freelance now and making the decision between time and money is starting to become a huge factor.<br /><br />ChrisChristopher Lightfoothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11553264212817527110noreply@blogger.com