So Paul has got a Macbook Pro. This is good news, as it gives me a chance to do some performance comparisons before deciding whether to wait some more, take the plunge, or buy something completely different like an iMac.
Paul’s Macbook is 2.16Ghz, 1GB RAM, 100GB 7200rpm HD. My Powerbook is 1.5Ghz, 1.5GB RAM, 80GB HD (not sure of the rpm). What’s the best way to compare these two? How about a task I wait for several times a week: compiling Cocoon.
This is doing a ./build.sh webapp on a clean download of Cocoon 2.1.8, using JDK 1.4.2.
Paul’s Macbook Pro: 1 minute 21 seconds.
My powerbook: 4 minutes 38 seconds
With JDK 1.5, the times were a bit different: 1 minute 11 vs. 3 minutes 2 seconds. Over a minute faster …
I think I might just go take a look in the Apple store. Just to, you know, see if they have any in stock. Not to buy or anything. Really. Back later … 
Update: on one of our servers (3Ghz, SATA hard disks) Cocoon takes 1 minute 2 seconds to compile. But that machine is not quite as portable …..
Related posts:
./build.sh webapp
…
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 minutes 9 seconds
Ran on a last generation Powerbook G4 (1.67Ghz, 7200rpm hd), JDK 1.5.
Think I should probably also point out that the build was using can run builds faster on this kind of kit, it does explain the difference between Andrew’s 3GHz server and the 2×2.16 GHz laptop.
Either way, let’s just say I’m ‘content’. Now, to write that parallel multiproject builder for Maven 2…
just for grins, i fired this up on my desktop at home:
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 minute 7 seconds
./build.sh webapp 61.71s user 3.64s system 95% cpu 1:08.25 total
amd64 3700+ (single core, 2.2GHz real), 2GB of RAM