System Requirements-what's the best PC for Flare?

[parsonsv]

My fumbling old computer is dying a slow and painful death. My company is willing to replace it with a hand-me-down from the developers. I've been asked to identify that besides the regular processing speed needed to run our software, how robust do I need my machine to be? I want to be honest so I receive a machine that is capable of fully working with Flare, Capture, etc, but I'm not sure what I need. Has anyone out there figured out the minimum machine necessary to enable you to fully work with Flare (perhaps having multiple help file instances open at a time), and at the same time work with capture, your software, other word processing software, mail, etc open at the same time?

My dying machine is a P4 with 2GB of RAM and 3.01 GHz processor. I have ample hard-drive space. Even with this configuration, I find the software is slow, especially when intelli-sense and the embedded analyzer portion of Flare are turned on.

I know MadCap lists the minimum requirements as p4 with 512 mb of RAM, but those requirements aren't sufficient for all I have to run. I want the optimal requirements, if possible.

Any advice?

[KevinDAmery]

I'm using a dual core Xeon that's about 2 years old now, and haven't had any performance troubles that I would lay at Flare's feet. (I have had network latency problems, but since a) these affect everything on the machine and not just Flare and b) other people in my area who don't use Flare have the same problems, I'd say they're not Flare's fault....) One thing to note, though, is I don't use intellisense, and others have mentioned that they find it adds a substantial performance hit. So ymmv.

2GB of RAM should be fine, although generally speaking the more the merrier when it comes to memory (with the proviso that if you get a 32 bit operating system it won't be able to use anything above 3.2 GB or thereabouts).

[GregStenhouse]

If possible, find out what they are developing Flare on at Madcap, and use the same setup. That is probably what Flare will be the most stable on - developers will fix bugs they find on their own PCs first and foremost...

Cheers
Greg

[parsonsv]

Thanks for the suggestion. I contacted MadCap, and Neal gave me the following response:

It looks as though your computer should be more than sufficient. I would recommend a computer with at least a 1.8GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, Windows XP SP3 or Vista SP1, and at least 10GB of RAM free on the HD. A dual-core processor may alleviate some performance issues. Flare itself will not run on more than 1 core, but Windows will, and while Flare may saturate one of the cores, the other core can run your other software and Windows.

[forfear]

I'm using a dual core Xeon that's about 2 years old now, and haven't had any performance troubles that I would lay at Flare's feet. (I have had network latency problems, but since a) these affect everything on the machine and not just Flare and b) other people in my area who don't use Flare have the same problems, I'd say they're not Flare's fault....)

a dual core xeon? that's what we use for servers only. Wow!


On a related post on Speeding up Flare/Compile times
Many have asked how the time for creating outputs can be reduced. The answer may not be all that intuitive. Those who have gone out and purchased the biggest, newest, fastest, whiz-bangy, multi-core, multi-thread, monster processor their budget can afford are usually rewarded with only a small improvement. How can this be? It is all about balance and data throughput.
http://madcapsoftware2.wordpress.com/20 ... ion-times/

[KHHS]

I have recently swapped the 7200rpm-HDD with an SSD (x25-m flash-based harddrive) in my Thinkpad (R61 with 3GB RAM).
That really makes a difference! Everything Read-related is faster and feels even much faster.
That applies to starting applications, starting windows, open flare-projects, sorting the file list of flare etc.
Compilation time however is only slightly better, nearly the same. That is probably because compilation includes many small writes and writing small files is not the strength of current SSDs, i think.
But nevertheless i would really recommend SSDs to flare users. The overall work-flow is just very "snappy" (?). And they are getting cheaper by the day.

[LTinker68]

I just got a new machine at work, too. It's not a whiz-bang machine, just more hard drive space, some more RAM, and a slightly faster processor. We buy computers in waves so I got what others got. I haven't actually used Flare yet on the new computer, so I'm not sure about compile times, but I can tell you everything else opens much quicker. And I don't think it's so much that it's a newer computer so much that McAfee was installed on the computer before all other apps. On the old computer, McAfee was distributed as part of a corporate-wide standard, and it would take up to 2 minutes to open MS Outlook and get email and it would take about 4-5 minutes to open StarTeam (not that I use it with Flare -- it was just the worst offender). Since McAfee was installed before I installed Flare and all my other apps, things have been a LOT better.

So make sure they harden the box as much as their security dictates, that they install all MS OS updates, and all enterprise-wise apps (like virus scanning software), etc., before they give the box to you. Which they should do anyway, but you never know.

[KHHS]

Here is an update to my post above, re SSD:
Due to a hardware failure I had to get a new PC (Thinkpad T500) and I left preinstalled Vista on it. I transferred the new Vista installation to my SSD (X-25m with new firmware!!) and swapped it into the T500.
Now compilation time is less than half than before (and everything else like starting Flare, sorting files etc. is also incredibly quick).
In detail: Compilation time of a 1000 topic project:
- old System about 6 minutes (Thinkpad R61, 3GB RAM, Win XP, 2.1 MHz dual core, SSD with old firmware)
- new System 2min 38sec (T500, 4GB RAM (2.5 GB used), Vista, 2.6 MHz dual core, SSD with new firmware)

I'm not really shure, what is the decisive factor, but I wanted to share my experience for those of you considering hardware/windows upgrade.

[forfear]

Solid State drives the way ahead!!!!

[RamonS]

SSDs are nice, but as long as the prices and sizes are not even close to what hard disks offer the majority cannot afford it. Although, the newer SSDs come in sizes of 128GB, that would just be enough for a Vista or Windows 7 install. Others run entire servers off that. So when do we get Flare ported to Mono?
In regards to PCs, I made the switch from AMD to Intel years ago and never looked back, although currently the Intel offerings aren't that bad. Already covered the fact that you want a fast hard drive. So what is left is that you want to look into securing your drive contents by RAID and plan for making backups. I got for that purpose a pizza box eServer 325. I took the IDE drive out and got a PCI-X SiL RAID controller that now runs a mirroring RAID. I got the server for 80$ and it complements my fat (and somewhat slow) server. You can get used server hardware for cheap. And if money isn't the issue, get one that has a SCSI backplane already in it and load it up with drives. Once in a while you get some deals where you can find large SCSIs for cheap, well, as cheap as SCSI goes. I like that box and expect to get years of use out of it. Of course, you can also just make backups of your projects and burn them to a DVD or get an eSATA drive. That saves money and desk space.

[parsonsv]

Do you think Vista had any impact?

[RamonS]

I'm not the only one who will say "Yes, Vista has an impact" - and except for the spin doctors from Microsoft everyone means it has a negative impact. Vista is just really bad software. Starts with the name, goes over the excessive waste of resources, to being slower than XP on pretty much all levels. Sure, if you install it on the tricked out dual quad-core rig with 8GB RAM and SSD it for sure flies, but anything will be faster on that rig than on the four year old XP box. Needless to say, I absolutely loathe Vista with every fiber of my being and highly recommend that everyone just ignores it. Maybe it goes away then, but I doubt it. Windows 7 is just the same as Vista, only a "little bit better" as Steve Ballmer aptly put it. Means the crapware got taken out and is now called "Live Essentials" or whatever other name they abused for it.

Again, MadCap, when can we finally run Flare on top of Mono??

[forfear]

ha ha

[beagley]

Flare running well on my MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB RAM (1067 Mz DDR3). I run Windows XP about 20% of the time, other times booted into OSX w/ Parallels... though if I want I can just edit Flare's files with VIM and just run OSX.

When something is slow, I'd sure say it isn't Flare's fault. It is the network, or some kind of Windows nonsense.

-d

[RamonS]

When something is slow, I'd sure say it isn't Flare's fault. It is the network, or some kind of Windows nonsense.

We cannot really know if Flare can only be run on Windows. Flare is based on .NET and .NET is based on Windows. There is currently no way to clearly separate the three. Again, if Flare would be able to run on Mono you could run it in Max OS X as well...theoretically. Banking fully on .NET made business sense, technology I still consider it to be the absolutely wrong decision.

[forfear]

Also don't forget to toggle off GDI+.

its what's slowing the XML editor environment for most people.

[beagley]

Hey Ramon,
Yeah, you're surely preaching to the choir about the use of .NET.
Such an incredible amount of awesome work and a powerful up and coming software company... chained to .NET! Oy!

But as long as it works, I'm just going to keep plugging away. Flare is better than anything else I've seen. And It runs under Parallels on my Mac so well that I barely notice the gaps. (I'm typing this in Firefox under Mac OSX, while an attached monitor runs Windows XP with my documents open in Flare. I've got Mac Mail and NetNewsWire, and the Mac Evernote client running in another window, naturally, and I'm editing images in Omnigraffle.
-d

[cayennep]

Also don't forget to toggle off GDI+.

its what's slowing the XML editor environment for most people.

doesn't show up in Flare help, how do you toggle this (nevermind what it is)

thx

[LTinker68]

View > Show > Enable GDI+ Text Renderer

[cayennep]

Thanks so much! It's off by default, I guess