I recently upgraded (side graded?) from a circa 2011 MacBook Pro to a 2015 MacBook. This change isn’t for everyone, but I’m pretty happy with the differences. In this post I explore what changed, and why I made the leap.
My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.
But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…
It started innocently enough. I was considering upgrading to a larger format monitor sometime in the next year or so. I like having lots of video “real estate” and, although my ViewSonic VP201 20″ LCD display has served me well, I am starting to feel crowded.
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve built a new machine. And I’ve completed my first performance test on it, before any optimizations and with an out of date video driver. Here is what I got running 3D Mark 2006: (more…)