The Inside Track on Firefox Development.

« Miscommunications | Main | Did I Mention... »

April 16, 2006

I Hate This Computer

I have been fighting with this computer for the past few days to do a build with a few patches applied.

First, I managed to get a certain distance with a branch build, compiling with Visual C++ 6.0. But soon I realized there were too many dependencies that were trunk specific, so I had to build trunk. About a quarter of the way through my build died, of course, compiling from the same shell, wrong version of VC6.0 for Cairo/Thebes.

Starting over again with the VC7 tools, another failure towards the end. Some sort of cyclic dependency check error. Clobber and restart. Now I forgot one of my patches had a configure change, and the process begins anew, I have effectively clobbered.

When I bought this machine, a Dell Precision M60 with a Pentium M 1.7GHz processor, a 7200rpm disk and a gig of RAM, it could compile Firefox start to stop in 21 minutes. Now it takes over an hour.

The situation is better on my Google-supplied workstation, but for how long? Over time, Windows reaches a point of being completely useless for anything aside from the most basic activities. What's the effect? I had planned to work both days this weekend on Firefox 2 features. Instead I spent the whole time fighting one of the most frustrating fights possible, and have achieved nothing. I hate Windows. I hate this computer.

Posted by ben at April 16, 2006 6:58 PM

Comments

I've got exactly the same problem. It now takes about 3 or 4 minutes for my computer to start while it used to start pretty quickly when I first got this machine. I guess I should reinstall Windows :\

Posted by: Jero at April 17, 2006 1:12 AM

Somehow, I succeeded in keeping my Windows installation lean & mean... It’s the same installation that’s running on this machine for 4 years now, and I never felt the need to reinstall it.

~Grauw

Posted by: Laurens Holst at April 17, 2006 1:52 AM

Wait... the Firefox build time is Windows' fault?

Posted by: James at April 17, 2006 4:57 AM

Well, over a certain period of time Windows usually seems to slow down, crash more, and just plain suck. I've reinstalled Windows on my computer about 3 times since 1999 just because of this - reinstalled all of teh same software, files, etc. And after reinstalling, it was again faster...for awhile...

Posted by: Chris at April 17, 2006 6:04 AM

Although Windows can probably be attributed to some slowdown, it doesn't really explain the interesting difference between current trunk and current 1.8 branch I have here.

A no-changes dependancy build of 1.8 branch Firefox: 22 minutes

A no-changes dependancy build of trunk Firefox: 40 minutes

I don't like it, but then I don't like most of the build system - but something has clearly slowed it down significantly since the branch, as best I can tell.

Posted by: James Ross at April 17, 2006 7:42 AM

Ben, speaking of wasting precious work time on stupid and irrelevant problems surrounding it, I hope you read the latest Joel, which is all about this. "The Development Abstraction Layer".

Posted by: Håkan at April 17, 2006 7:54 AM

People, please, either use a decent tool to clean up Windows' registry (that's where the problem is) or just go and use Linux...

www.ubuntu.com

Posted by: Yogarine at April 17, 2006 8:06 AM

Get a copy of Acronis TrueImage, and rebuild your install... then make an image of it. When windows gets crummy, go back to the image. I keep weekly images, so if something goes south... I just restore back to the week before.

Much better than reinstalling for every little thing.

Posted by: Robert Accettura at April 17, 2006 10:54 AM

> Over time, Windows reaches a point of being
> completely useless for anything aside from the
> most basic activities.

Why do you use it, then? There are several alternatives.

Posted by: Glasswalker at April 17, 2006 1:20 PM

Mabye use VMWare? Just reset the OS everyday.

Posted by: Dustin Long at April 18, 2006 9:24 AM

@glasswalker: when developing for an OS, it's usually good to have it installed...

Posted by: Daniel Schierbeck at April 18, 2006 12:27 PM

There are lots of good tools out there on the market and most of them are FREE that will do a good Window's registry clean and also clean other parts of your system, the only thing they dont do is blow out your tower with comp air lol

I always do a good pc clean once a month and I do lots of other things as well, this keeps my pc working tip top all the time, also I hate Dell as i think they play with there systems way to much and can't just build there systems as a nice easy to work with standerd system!

Posted by: Karl at April 22, 2006 2:17 AM

1 hour to build from scratch ? nuts

I get 150,000 + lines of java code built in
under a 15 seconds with eclipse on a lesser machine running linux.

I wonder how long it would take to build that many lines of C#?

verdict:
java/linux == productivity
windows/c++ == frustration

Posted by: jofeki at May 17, 2006 10:35 AM

©1997-2006 Ben Goodger. All Rights Reserved.
Opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of any organization that I may be affiliated with.
Reload icon is © Stephen Horlander;
Firefox logo is by Jon Hicks, and is a trademark of The Mozilla Foundation.
GetFirefox buttons are from rakaz