A Brief History of [Wasted] Time

Over the last couple of decades, practical PC bottlenecks have moved.  I remember a time when upgrading CPUs could provide a near-linear speed increase with respect to clock speed (does anyone remember the thrill of going from a 33MHz 486 processor to a a 486/66?).  Later, keeping the processor fed became more important.  Improved memory bus speeds, lower cache latency, larger cache sizes, and more RAM often provided the best performance increase.  And of course, we had network issues – starting with dial-up performance.  Thankfully, most of those resources are no longer the slowest components in modern PCs.  In fact, CPUs have increased in performance to the point that clock speed increases give little practical benefits for most users (on the client side, at least).

Wringing some[Bottle]necks…

Over the last several years, the primary bottleneck on most of my machines (notebooks, development desktops, and music production machines) has been hard disk performance.  If I was waiting for something, it was more than likely that hard drive.  The high number and frequency of random I/Os often resulted in significant delays.  Even with large amounts of RAM, launching programs, loading web pages, and performing builds in Visual Studio could take a lot of time.  High-speed, low-latency hard disks helped a little.  And, if you can stomach the risk of data loss, RAID-0 configurations could alleviate some of the pain.  But, disk access remained the slow step in many processes.

One of my clients, TechTurn, was kind enough to lend me a Samsung 128GB Solid State Disk (SSD) to test.  At first, I imaged my notebook Windows 7 Release Candidate installation and placed it on the SSD.  I was expecting an incremental increase in performance (at least for random, small reads).  The overall results, however, were amazing!  Applications launched in a just a few seconds, and some basic benchmarks provided all the evidence I needed to place the new disk in my primary development machine (a Dell Dimension XPS 420 with two 500GB, 7200RPM drives).  Now, after just a couple of weeks, I can’t imagine going back to “old school” physical drives.

SSD’s are new to the marketplace and they’re not without significant potential drawbacks.  In the coming weeks, I’ll provide some more details on the experience.  For now, here are a couple of basic benchmarks created using HDTune.  The basic comparison is between a Samsung 500GB, 7200 RPM hard disk (16MB cache) and the 128GB Samsung SSD.  I did absolutely nothing to optimize the performance of the SSD, so consider this just a baseline.

Benchmarks

HDTune – Disk Benchmarks

Figure 1a: HDD Performance (Dell XPS 420)

Figure 1b:  SSD Performance (Dell XPS 420)

HDTune – Random Access Performance

Figure 2a: HDD Performance (Dell XPS 420)

Figure 2b: SSD Performance (Dell XPS 420)

I realize that this data is completely anecdotal and unscientific, but it’s a promising start.  So far, the general performance improvement from using an SSD has been the single most noticeable upgrade in several years.

More to come…

Again, I hope to post some more detailed data (with a focus on benefits for development workstations) in the coming weeks.  Now if only my own sequential writing speed could match that of the SSD drive…

Update: The Engineering Windows 7 blog has a post that covers Support and Q & A for Solid-State Drives.  It helps provide some technical background related to the different between random vs. sequential I/O’s and issues related to random writing.

Several months ago, I took the plunge and switched from my primary browser (Avant Browser – which basically automates IE with a bunch of new features) to Firefox.  I was on the fence for a while.  I generally liked Firefox’s user interface and performance, but missed some of the navigation features that were available in IE.  What finally pushed me to switch to Firefox were some really useful (but not always well-known) add-ons.  I now find them to be almost indispensible to my web browsing habits.  So, without further delay, here’s a list of my favorites (with minimal comments as the Firefox Add-Ons site provides the best explanations with screenshots):

• AutoPager: The page-based nature of the Web can make it really difficult to navigate through large documents.  Often, you’ll have to click through pages one-by-one.  What if the Google Search result you want didn’t make the first page?  You generally would have to manually navigate to the next page of results (or change the default view to include more results).  And don’t get me started on sites that force you to click through a dozen pages to read an entire article.  AutoPager can automatically load content from additional pages without losing context.  It supports hundreds of sites out of the box and provides an easy way to add support for new sites.  I highly recommend it, at least until the Web (and advertising) start supporting better ways to view large amounts of information.
• FoxTab: A great multi-tab browser that allows you to choose from a wide variety of different “gallery” views that show thumbnails of open tabs.  It seems to scale and perform well, even with dozens of open tabs.

• SpeedDial:  Most of us frequent the same sites many times per day.  The default user behavior – typing URLs or choosing them from the Bookmarks list – can be quite cumbersome.  As its name suggests, SpeedDial provides users with thumbnails of their most common web sites whenever they open a new tab.  ~80% of the time, I use the keyboard shortcuts (Alt-# or CTRL-#) to open the sites I use the most.
• Read It Later:  It might seem a little strange, but I’ve all but abandoned the use of bookmarks in my browsers.  I am usually very organized, but I found that it takes too much effort to store and organize separate links (many of which tend to quickly become outdated).  Read It Later provides a great way to keep track of specific articles and content that you plan to read later without requiring you to create bookmarks.  When you’re bored, you can just click on its icon, and you’ll be presented with on of the pages from its list.  You can easily mark something as “read” without having to deal with deleting bookmarks.
• IE Tab: Despite a strong push to work on standards-based sites and browsers, the need to launch IE is sometimes inevitable.  An example that comes to mind is the SQL Server Reporting Services web site which doesn’t seem to render properly in Firefox.  IE Tab allows you to simply click an icon on the status bar to switch to using the IE rendering engine for that tab.  You get to stay in the comfort of Firefox while using IE behind the scenes.

Those are the highlights of my favorite extensions.   You can easily download and install all of these extensions using the Firefox Add-Ons page.  Installation couldn’t be much simpler, and it’s really easy to try out new extensions.

But, wait – there’s more:  So far, my favorite theme is Chromifox Basic.  As its name implies, it’s hardly the flashiest of themes.  But, I really like its simple look and customizations.

There’s certainly no lack of web pages and blog entries that highlight “must-have Firefox.  (There are so many, in fact, that I’m not going to bother to link to any of them.)  Now, I can add myself to that list.

While it seems that the powers of marketing are often used for evil rather than good, every once in a while, we see an entertaining site or application.  Microsoft has given us its share of humorous clips and commercials.  This time around, it’s Microsoft Server Quest – a Flash-based, animated game that allows you to try to save the entire office with your superior intellect.  You’ll also get some valuable discount codes (which are not-so-cleverly disguised in the standard dialog).  It’s not exactly World of Warcraft, but you can earn up to 4,800 GeekPoints.  You can use those… well, nowhere.  But it’s still fun.