[photon_off]

I purposefully use an outdated (3-5 years off the top of the line) machine to ensure my web applications run well on anybody using a similarly outdated configuration. I've considered upgrading and using a VM to emulate this, but I'm not quite sure it'd have the same effect. I've found that what I have is "good enough" to work on, but "not good enough" to run overly demanding javascript and DOM riddled pages without noticing.

[dingle_thunk]

Actually, you will have a more accurate effect because most web servers are VMs. Also, the ability to do snapshots/rollbacks/clones should not be underestimated. Upgrading from a dell E630 (T8100 2GB) to an E6410 (i7 8GB) and buying a technet subscription has doubled my productivity as a web developer (not an exaggeration).

[photon_off]

How does a much faster computer double your productivity? Other than booting up programs, I'm rarely blocked by my computer being slow. The development I do is mainly text editing with a browser to view results.

I could see this being different if I had to wait for things to compile, though. But still, double is a pretty large claim.

[stoney]

I think the productivity increase is more than the time saved waiting for stuff to load. That few seconds pause can be enough to interrupt my flow, at which point I think, 'hmmm, let's check out HN while I wait for that'. Of course, by the time whatever I was waiting for is done I'm deep into an interesting thread about how a faster computer will change my life...

[barrkel]

Compile times for the tree I work on range between around 40 minutes (the build VMs at work) and 7 minutes (locally, X-25 SSD, overclocked i7 920, 12GB RAM etc.) There's a huge difference between those two; and even more, my machine is almost perfectly responsive while I'm building.

The things like ad-hoc log file analysis. The compiler I work with can spit out colossal amounts of logs depending on the settings. A bash pipeline is naturally parallelized, and being able to do grep / sed / sort / uniq etc. rollups over the data in say 4 seconds versus 12 or 20 seconds greatly reduces the chances of breaking flow. A 4 second wait doesn't really tempt you to context switch to another window. 20 or 30 seconds does.

[Groxx]

How much time, focus, and motivation is lost due to slowdowns, though? Some days, they certainly seem to take rather large tolls.

The little things matter.

[photon_off]

Little things certainly matter, but only a little. In my experience, the most limiting factor in productivity is motivation and being healthy. These things are orders of magnitude more beneficial, and rarely effected by, my machine's speed. For the work I do (web development), the bottlenecks are very rarely the machine itself. At worst, I need to restart Firefox once a day, which make take up to a minute as I eat a banana.

[dingle_thunk]

The VMS are a big part of it. I can just go nuts on stuff because I can roll-back and/or fork entire operating systems easily. Of course, there's also things like compile time and flow interruption - but really, the VMs just let me experiment so much bettter.

[prodigal_erik]

Even when all my Java is already compiled, Eclipse routinely locks up for seconds at a time as it's "helping" me. I've worked in the same place for a few years, and the IT guy recently told me my laptop is part of the oldest batch in the entire company.

[bitboxer]

He ment that the customer who uses his web page has an outdated computer.