How to select best HW and SW configuration for Lazarus development PC?

[Piko]

What components are most important If I want to speed up compiling and linking time?

Faster processor?
Multiple processors?
Faster disk or using RAM disk?
More ram?
Linux or Windows platform ?



Thanks.

[marcov]

What components are most important If I want to speed up compiling and linking time?

Faster processor?
Multiple processors?

Fast processor.  High clocked dual core i5's are popular. On the other hand you could work fine on an old P4 too.

The compilation process has no parallellism, and the bit that make -j adds can't even saturate 2 cores.

Faster disk or using RAM disk?

Fast disks. I use a 300GB raptor.
I haven't tested SSDs yet. (but note that FPC compilation has a high write percentage, so don't only judge on read speeds)

More ram?

Not really. The FPC sources are not terribly big, and everything will already be optimally cached with 2GB

Linux or Windows platform ?

Speedwise, Linux is much faster. Moreover, Linux has more room for tweaking. (mount options, atime)

But sooner or later you might have to test on other systems too, so install a dual boot.

[Leledumbo]

Linux is also more flexible as you can build Windows binaries from there easily (well, that's due to PE specification actually). But Linux version of FPC doesn't yet have internal linker so linking could be very slow and memory consuming compared to Windows.

[Piko]

Marcov and Leledumbo

Thak you for your answers

Piko

[giorgiotani]

What components are most important If I want to speed up compiling and linking time?

Investing on a fast processor is the best choice in my experience, even if you will not need many cores or multiple CPU for compiling (however it is good having more cores than needed, so other tasks will not slow down compiling), just good clock and IPC.

Fast disks are always good, SSD is better for random read/write (many small files), RAM disks are even faster (but somewhat unpractical for daily usage).
But IMHO having the data cached in RAM is the better option, so if you have a reasonable amount of RAM next times you read the files the mass storage, on a modern system, should be only minimally involved.

In my experience, reading / writing files is faster on Linux than on Windows, but overall compiling and linking even a big project is reasonably fast with Lazarus on any system and any reasonably powered machine.
For example on Linux I mostly work on virtual machines, and Lazarus performances used to be acceptable even on VM hosted on 5 years ago hardware.