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new processor for experimental development
Saturday, August 7 2021
Gretchen and I had our usual Saturday morning out on the east deck, where the panagram for the New York Times Spelling Bee was "hormonal" (with "o" in the middle).
I would end up having a relaxing day mostly by myself while Gretchen was off doing things with Barbara while she's still in te Hudson Valley. It turns out Barbara is actually thinking of moving to the area, even though the only one she really knows in these parts is her old girlfriend Gretchen.
One of the things I did today was plug the SSD from Wolverine into my brand-new AM4 motherboard, the one built around an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 six-core processor. This allowed me to test what NPM compilations are like using a modern processor (one able to work more than three times as fast as the one in Woodchuck, my main computer). Disappointingly, the speeds weren't mind-blowingly fast, and in some cases weren't faster at all. I suspect this has something to do with Node working mostly single-thread, though there are probably other factors in play as well. A full compilation of the Angular-based web app, the one that has made me look so hard for a faster processor, takes 3.6 minutes with this processor. It had taken 7.9 minutes with my work-issued four-core Ryzen 5 Mobile 2500U based laptop, what had been my fastest hardware. So that's an improvement. But I'm still getting one-to-two minute compile times just from adding or removing white space in a single source file, and that's far too long for the experimental code development I want to do. (I say "experimental" because everything I do when building out new features on an existing code base requires that I perform interactive experiments, sometimes dozens of them in fast succession. When every experiment requires a two minute wait, the problem is obvious.) Still, two minutes is better than six, which is how my Ryzen laptop often performs.
Another thing I did today was attend a funeral in western Connecticut for my uncle George, the man Barbara (my mother's twin sister) married. He'd actually died over a year ago, and his funeral had been delayed by the pandemic. Covid times still being upon us, all I had to do was navigate to a Zoom address, where I consumed, but did not contribute to, the proceedings. Evidently George was a Unitarian, and most of the music consisted of musty old hymns accompanied by a banjo being played like a rhythm guitar. I hadn't known this, but for the last year or more of George's life, he suffered from life-altering injuries resulting from a skiing accident. One of his injuries made it so he couldn't swallow, among other things. The funeral was less than a three-hour drive away Gretchen and I probably should've attended. But, honestly, I barely knew George at all. He was a chemist who worked his whole life for some one company (I think it was Uniroyal) and that's about all I did know.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210807 feedback
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