What hardware is better for run heave Lisp,VBA, or any code?

[jtm2020hyo]

I want upgrade my hardware. But I'm not sure what hardware should I priorice... Maybe a better SSD that CPU or RAM?

[martti.halminen]

The greatest influence on the general performance is the mass storage: if you don't have a SSD, getting one is the number one priority. 

RAM only influences performance (negatively) if you don't have enough of it. (if we are not talking about tweaking clock speeds etc.)

Most of AutoCAD and all AutoLISP and VBA is single-threaded, so processor performance on one core is the important value: multiple cores are of no use when idle (as long as you have at least two, so that a stuck program won't freeze the whole machine).

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[jtm2020hyo]

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@martti.halminen wrote:

The greatest influence on the general performance is the mass storage: if you don't have a SSD, getting one is the number one priority. 

RAM only influences performance (negatively) if you don't have enough of it. (if we are not talking about tweaking clock speeds etc.)

Most of AutoCAD and all AutoLISP and VBA is single-threaded, so processor performance on one core is the important value: multiple cores are of no use when idle (as long as you have at least two, so that a stuck program won't freeze the whole machine).

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Thanks for reply.

Should I disable Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology to get a better Lisp/FAS/VBA performance?

[dgorsman]

I'll have to disagree slightly - the biggest influence on performance is efficient and well-planned code.  An overclocked water-cooled monstrosity isn't going to help a program that runs thousands of unnecessary loops, for example.

[martti.halminen]

> Should I disable Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology to get a better Lisp/FAS/VBA performance?

That is more of a software question, so worth more of a software answer: try it both ways with exactly the same, representative workload, and time it. Also, check what happens with other important tools you use: some programs get faster with HT, others get slower.

More generally, upgrading hardware only speeds up things linearily, and only if the thing you change is the bottleneck. If you have an exponentially growing problem, no amount of hardware you throw at it will help much. So, if your computer performance is otherwise acceptable, it is time to take a look at your problem software: is the task inherently expensive, or are you using inefficient algorithms.

In software optimization, the most important task is measuring the performance at detail level: quite often the hot spot is hiding in some odd place.

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[ronjonp]

Maybe it's not hardware you need. 8-)