Parallel RSpec Performance Testing

We’re currently deciding on hardware to build a bit of a testing cluster on which we’ll run whatever the current best remote testing package we can find. At the moment, for us, that’s ended up being Specjour. We ended up pitting one of our i7 iMacs against a $400 Acer box we bought. We installed Ubuntu’s REE 1.8.7 on the Acer machine and RVM and REE 1.8.7 on the iMac.

i7 iMac – Quad Core Hyperthreading

real 11m14.131s
user 0m0.776s
sys 0m0.348s

Acer – E5200 Dual Core E5200

real 35m56.658s
user 0m0.870s
sys 0m2.500s

It seems like the little Acer box offers slightly better value for money in this case. I’d like to see how we’d do with some virtualisation sitting on top this, but I think the included memory will be quite limiting in this regard. I wonder whether the processor resources are actually being fully utilised.