Hardware requirements

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Guest

I know this may sound like a stupid question, but could anyone suggest methods for determining hardware requirements (such as cpu, ram, etc) for an application

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Paul K
 
It's not a stupid question, but it's difficult to answer. RAM's a matter of
what you're storing; if you're doing image / sound / video editing you can
work out what the maximum size of data you're dealing with will be (and then
triple it, is what we use as a rule of thumb). As for CPU, unless you're
using any hardware specific acceleration, most stuff will work on any
processor, but it's down to how spongy you think it should run and still be
useable. We tend to advise people not to bother unless they've got at least
a P III processor since we do use a lot of fast algorithm libraries that
don't have much accelerating effect on earlier processors.

So my advice: test it on a lower-spec machine from the one you develop on,
and see if it works ok. If you're not doing anything enormously memory or
processor intensive, you can probably go fairly low with your requirements,
otherwise it's definitely best to test it on a lower-spec machine.

Steve

Paul K said:
I know this may sound like a stupid question, but could anyone suggest
Click to expand...
methods for determining hardware requirements (such as cpu, ram, etc) for an
application?
 
Minimum hardware requirements are usually just a general guideline and it's
usually based on testing and some guess work.

Basically, use older hardware and see what works acceptably and what
doesn't. From that, you should be able to establish a good guideline.

If you don't have the proper equipment to do this sort of testing, another
option is to use a CPU stress test app that will suck up some of your CPU,
and just guesstimate what your minimum requirement is based on that.

There are no hard and fast rules on this.

Part of the reason is that two machines with similar specs can have vastly
different performance. As an example, I've got a Toshiba laptop that is
terrific, but its hard drive is slow and it makes everything else slower
than on a comparable desktop with a decent hard drive.

Pete
 
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