Mac User and Emailer

Following up Giles’ interview:

My Quad arrived safely. I dropped the ball and failed to order my memory upgrade in parallel with the machine. With the holidays fragmenting shipping schedules, I ended up spending a work-week with 512MB of memory. Torture: the Quad was agonizing with its paltry stock 512MB. It was slower than my PowerBook as soon as I had three applications running.

Lesson learned: adequate memory is critical for performance. Hmm, more like lesson remembered. Since 2000, all my personal machines have had at least 1GB, so I forgot the pain of heavy swap. 512MB is probably enough for email+web+office if you don’t task switch too much, but if you’re a developer I recommend a minimum of 1GB.

I popped 6GB of ECC into the machine. Unless you have datasets that cross the 32-bit limit, going with more than 4GB is probably overkill. The Unified Buffer Cache makes use of the “extra” memory in any case, but I don’t have metrics to measure its value. I can only offer that it is theoretically faster.

At the 1GB-stick-size, going ECC adds about a 10% price premium: totally worth it in my opinion. I don’t have a cloud chamber handy to measure cosmic rays at my altitude, but the metric I hear is cosmic rays will flip 1 bit per gigabyte per week. With 6GB of RAM, I’m looking at about four bytes going rouge per month. ECC supposedly mostly solves the problem. The downside is that I’m less able to blame cosmic rays when things don’t work as I expect them too…

Tip in passing: it was nonobvious from the web or the manual if I could simultaneously run a dual-link DVI (30” Cinema) and a single-link DVI (20” Dell) off one GeForce 7800 GT. You can — you just can’t attach two dual-links at the same time and utilize them fully.

As expected, the performance is impressive — especially coming off a TiBook 800. For example, one of my apps takes 29 minutes to compile from scratch on the TiBook (and that’s with the fastest notebook drive you can buy). The same project takes 3 minutes to compile on the Quad. I’ll admit I was hoping for a sub-minute compile, but that’s not half bad.

Oh, aside to Michael: It’s not you. Xcode is slow for everyone.

Finally, I publicly slipped my dirty little secret: I use a really old email client, and I’ve resigned to write my own. That brought fellow desperate folks out pinging me for details. Will it be made public? Freeware? Commercial? Open source? Will it support IMAP? Correctly? Completely?

I’m still hashing it out, but I can state even at this early stage, chances are this client is not for you. No built-in HTML email viewing. MIME attachments are not automatically decoded and written into the file system (only the raw SMTP message is stored). No IMAP. No spam filtering (!). No folders (!!).

Essentially, this client is an experiment in email clients, and <your critical feature> will be missing. I’m going to demand-page-in features in as I need them, and my email usage is likely radically different from yours. I’ll probably blog its creation and the rational behind its design, so stay tuned for updates.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006
12:00 AM