Reply to: SSDs and multitasking

[escapeUK]

I'd put more RAM in the box. We're using VS2010 here and it sucks big stylee.

More ram will only help if its 64 bit Windows.

VS2010 is fine, just very slow interface. Most microsoft products are worse, slower than the previous version.

[d000hg]

Why did you upgrade? We stayed on 2008 - only a handful of .NET 4.0 features are worth going for and if necessary it is possible to make same binary build to run on .NET 4.0 CLR (well, they still bloody call CLR being 2.0 - total BS with parallel numbering).

Maybe for C++ compiler, or one of the other new things added other than which .Net versions are supported... web-focused stuff although I'm not sure what exactly.

[VectraMan]

I seem to have "fixed" the problem by moving the swap file to the hard disk, rather than on the SSD.

It doesn't build any faster, but the rest of the system is now fast and responsive whilst the build is happening.

[AtW]

I'd put more RAM in the box. We're using VS2010 here and it sucks big stylee.

Why did you upgrade? We stayed on 2008 - only a handful of .NET 4.0 features are worth going for and if necessary it is possible to make same binary build to run on .NET 4.0 CLR (well, they still bloody call CLR being 2.0 - total BS with parallel numbering).

[doodab]

Seems odd no reviews I ever read, or people with SSDs, mention this.

New MacBooks come with SSDs and I really doubt those are going to last a year or less.

A couple of people getting bad units does not make a useful statistic.

Also worth mentioning that duff memory can also result in filesystem and data corruption.

Chances are that people who are throwing this much money at SSDs are also using a large amount of "high-performance" RAM i.e. that often overpriced rebinned non-ECC stuff that run over voltage to eke out a few more MHz.

[d000hg]

Seems odd no reviews I ever read, or people with SSDs, mention this.

New MacBooks come with SSDs and I really doubt those are going to last a year or less.

A couple of people getting bad units does not make a useful statistic.

[doodab]

I don't effing believe it - Two -ve reps for a serious post trying to be helpful!

"bad misinformation, or trolling in serious forum"

"rumour and innuendo"

OK, here was the link I was thinking of:

The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

So whoever repped me, hang your heads in shame. (Or may all your SSDs go tits up when you least expect it )

I wasn't one of the reppers but I would say that it's slightly unscientific. As someone in the comments pointed out, if SSDs were that unreliable, there would be a lot more people making noise about it.

I would be inclined to say that Mr Portman Wills should probably stop opening computers.

I would say that based on the numbers I have seen the intel ones seem to be more reliable than other brands.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-...omposants.html

Edit: added link to actual numbers

[OwlHoot]

Surprisingly (as it has no moving parts), SSD cards are notoriously unreliable and are almost guaranteed to fail within a year.

I saw a blog article on this, but don't now have the reference. NickFitz probably knows though.

I don't effing believe it - Two -ve reps for a serious post trying to be helpful!

"bad misinformation, or trolling in serious forum"

"rumour and innuendo"

OK, here was the link I was thinking of:

The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty.

I bought a set of three Crucial 128 GB SSDs in October 2009 for the original two members of the Stack Overflow team plus myself. As of last month, two out of three of those had failed. And just the other day I was chatting with Joel on the podcast (yep, it's back), and he casually mentioned to me that the Intel SSD in his Thinkpad, which was purchased roughly around the same time as ours, had also failed.

Portman Wills, friend of the company and generally awesome guy, has a far scarier tale to tell. He got infected with the SSD religion based on my original 2009 blog post, and he went all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years … and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying: ...

So whoever repped me, hang your heads in shame. (Or may all your SSDs go tits up when you least expect it )

[Churchill]

I'd put more RAM in the box. We're using VS2010 here and it sucks big stylee.

[AtW]

Is it possible that a faster SSD means that much more of the system resources are being used on the disk system, therefore the rest of the system becomes less responsive?

No.

Not unless there is some serious issue with SSD - when used for writing a lot they can slow down massively and this can substantially reduce performance of the whole system if it is installed on it.

[d000hg]

Surprisingly (as it has no moving parts), SSD cards are notoriously unreliable and are almost guaranteed to fail within a year.

I saw a blog article on this, but don't now have the reference. NickFitz probably knows though.

I bet he doesn't because that's crap.

[OwlHoot]

Surprisingly (as it has no moving parts), SSD cards are notoriously unreliable and are almost guaranteed to fail within a year.

I saw a blog article on this, but don't now have the reference. NickFitz probably knows though.

[JoJoGabor]

Get perfmon out and check your disk perofmrnace. Look for any disk queues greater than 2 and disk reads or writes taking more than 0.01 of a second. If they are all ok look at CPU and memory usage, CPU queues etc

[xchaotic]

4GB is not that much these days, you can probably add another 2x2GB for you lunch money.
Finally you can try to manually set the VS affinnity to use Core #3 or sth rarely used, so that the OS and non-multicore aware software can use a core other than the Visual Studio.

I am also betting that your SSD is crap in random writes and probably deteriorated since new due to it being an early model with no TRIM support and/or internal garbage collection, you could try some utility to try and restore some of the performance.

Also the latest shiny in SSD is >500MB read/write which is eons better than earlier models, but more importantly 60000 IOPS which is usually quite handy when building/compiling a project.

[Clever Hans]

Some non-SSD pointers via google, eg. here* to try first, o omnipotent one.

But it does sound like the temp file issue described above - I think low end SSDs are not always high speed at all times and under all conditions.

So you could attempt to prove this by moving the temp folders to a secondary (non-SSD) HD, or even experiment with a ramdisk (make sure you choose one that is persisted on boot if necessary).

eg. RAMDisk - Software - Server Memory Products & Services - Dataram

(Free for non-corporate use to 4GB if you want to try it).

If the temp folder tweaking sorts it, then stick with the secondary hard drive, or use the info to blag a top end SSD.


*a very short time later, this post now appears as a backlink on that page which is a bit creepy.