Hardware for Java build server

Question

I don't know if this is the correct area for the question, so I apologise if it is not...
The company I work for is budgeting a seperate build server for our developers to use. We are currently 100% sparc in the server environment. Does anyone have any real work benchmarks or experience with using different architectures for compiling code? We are looking at benchmarks between T2000, V40z, and x4200. It looks like we will get all three to get our hands on to test ourselves, but wanted to know if this has already been done and documented somewhere. The server will not be doing any application/db/etc work, just compiling. Are the FP shortcomings of the T2000 any issue with java compiliation? Would a 2x or 4x dual-core opteron be faster? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Depending on the size of your projects, the frequency of buildcycles, etc., you might just pull one of your oldest servers out of your serverfarm (and put a new one in instead) and use that.
That's the way most companies (and individuals) do it.
That machine doesn't have to be blazing fast, it hardly matters if a build takes 10 seconds or 30 for example, as usually people won't be waiting for it (or if they are they have other things to do while waiting like smoking a fag or drinking coffee which they'd otherwise do after the build was complete).
At home I use an old laptop with a Celeron 400 and 196MB RAM as my buildbox.
For my single project it's plenty fast enough, taking maybe 2 minutes when on my P4-2.4 with 1.5GB RAM it takes just over 1 minute to build the same project.
It could easily handle a lot more too, but at the moment I have no need for that excess capacity.