I just bought a new Macbook for myself.  Its a 17″, I7 (2.66ghz), 8 gig ram, 256Gb SSD (solid state drive).  The performance of the new system is what I had hoped.  To compare, I decided to boot up JBoss AS 6 trunk and compare it against my old Macbook (2.6 Core 2 Duo, 4gig ram, 7200rpm HD).  Since OSX does do disk caching, its good to record both the initial JBoss AS boot time vs. subsequent boot times.

Old Macbook:

Time #1: 39.3 seconds

Time #2: 26.2 seconds

New Macbook:

Time #1: 20.8 seconds

Time #2: 19.1 seconds

Observations:

Initial boot is almost 47% faster for new machine, while, after disk cache comes into play, it is about 27% faster.  Now from what I’ve read, the I7 starts at 2.66ghz and starts to clock up to 3.3 ghz as you need the processing power. 3.3ghz is 27% faster than the 2.6ghz, so it make sense that Time #2 comparisons have a 27% difference.  What’s interesting to note is Time #1 comparisons as (maybe I’m wrong here) it looks like the SSD plays a huge performance role for initial reads, which is what I had hoped.  I could not get any specs for the 256Gb SSD drive from Apple’s web site or from calling up their sales force on the phone.  Since the new Macbooks are only a few weeks old, I could only get information by looking at SSD comparisons from various blogs, articles, and forum posts of older Macs.

Building Resteasy

I also compared building Resteasy with the old vs. new machine.

Old machine: 193 seconds

New Machine: 144 seconds

What’s interesting about these numbers is that the new machine is only 25.4% faster.  This looks like to me that SSD writes are slower than the 7200rpm box.  Yeah, I’m too lazy to download a diskbench, but you get the idea.  I did find this though (scroll to bottom to look at disk comparisons).  This gives some hints I think.