I've chatted with people that love working on their macbook airs, and honestly, they have a lot going for them. They're nice light machines with a surprising amount of performance for their form factor.
I always argue that they're way slower than much cheaper machines, like a good workstation. Ergonomics aside, I wanted to get some performance numbers.
I've attached a script to this gist that will grab Sinatra and time how long it takes to bundle it, run the full tests, and run a single test.
This is a pretty lightweight project, so times should be short all-around. I'd like to do this with a rails app as well, but couldn't quickly find a medium size open source rails app.
Please run the script, and in the comments fill out the following:
- Computer type (Macbook Air, custom workstation, Thinkpad, etc)
- Operating System
- Hard disk (or SSD) type (and throughput if you know it)
- Processor type and speed
- Amount of RAM
- Anything else you think contributes to the performance.
Then, include the time line for each command. It should look something like:
0.56user 0.07system 0:00.64elapsed 98%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 103648maxresident)k
The first number is the most important here.
Now, for a completely arbitrary score, do the following computation:
(Bundle Time) + (Suite Time * 10) + (Test Time * 100)
To reflect a rough workflow of bundling once, running the suite before commits, and running individual files while developing.
This benchmark is probably pretty flawed. Before complaining about potential bias or problems, come up with your own benchmark and let's try it.
OK, here's my results:
Score: 148.76