If I was to buy a new computer and I wanted the fastest poss

Question

If I was to buy a new computer and I wanted the fastest possible compile times specifically intelliJ kotlin though I do ofc have many other toolchains what should be my focus point

groostav · Answer

I feel like jetbrains should make a kotlin benchmarking suite A nicely packaged script that pulls ktor indexes it builds it runs its tests maybe runs some benchmarks would be neat if we could get anantech et al to run it If they did Id be an anantech reader again

groostav · Answer

I wonder if I can wrap all this into a little exe4j install4j package

serebit · Answer

More cores threads as compile times scale pretty well with number of logical processors

karelpeeters · Answer

Definitely get an SSD the intelij loading times and everything in general goes way faster

groostav · Answer

yeah < karelpeeters> that was my first thought but I worked for a company that invested a massive amount of money in SSDs for their build servers years ago and build times dropped by a couple percentage points Management wasn t happy

groostav · Answer

< serebit> is that true of kotlinc wrapping java Is there a jetbrains blog about this

karelpeeters · Answer

I don t know about build servers but for a standard desktop the difference is incredible

groostav · Answer

Think a crosspoint optane drive read stupidly expensive SSD over a more standard SSD is worth it if the only thing you used this machine for was building big old java kotlin projects in intelliJ

serebit · Answer

I haven t tested kotlinc wrapping java specifically but it s a generally accepted rule of thumb that compile times improve drastically with number of cores

karelpeeters · Answer

Get something in the middle an NVMe SSD I haven t tried an optane drive yet simple smile

serebit · Answer

It depends on the specific workload of course but in my personal experience I upgraded from an i5 6400 with 4c4t to a R7 3700X with 8c16t Gradle compile times have more than halved with my new CPU

serebit · Answer

Don t get NVMe if you re only doing compile workloads It s not worth the premium

serebit · Answer

And compilation doesn t hit storage nearly as much as cache so an SSD won t improve compile times nearly as much as a better CPU

serebit · Answer

It ll improve IntelliJ startup time sure but it s not going to do much for compilation

karelpeeters · Answer

And the indexing every time you do something with git

serebit · Answer

geoff asked about compile times so that s what I m addressing

groostav · Answer

right I think thats the thing if intellij and or gradle gets to be clever with incremental compilation your IO limited if you drop a big ol compile all this code on your computer you re CPU bound

serebit · Answer

yep So I d look for a CPU with SMT maybe 16 threads and 8 cores and a large cache

serebit · Answer

So basically what I bought haha

karelpeeters · Answer

It s strange that I can t find any information whether the kotlin compiler is multithreaded at all

mathew murphy · Answer

Also plenty of RAM obviously

mathew murphy · Answer

Make sure you can fit IDEA and the compiler into RAM and have plenty of space left for cache

Mike · Answer

< groostav> likely didn t see an impr9on build server for ssd as most things would get loaded in memory and stay there So disk not doing much For your machine you ll have various apps running start and stop them and open various files Ssd will make a difference And nowadays unless you really go out of your way you re getting an ssd But as others have said they re are levels of ssds too