Just as a data point, I recently bought a new Mac Mini and it was slow to the point of being unusable, even for office work. The machine may have been a dud but there was nothing obviously wrong with it physically and many Amazon reviewers reported similar experience. So getting latest-generation Mac Minis may not be the best option (older models are probably fine).
On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 3:23 PM, Daniel Peebles <pumpkin...@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't have a good sense of how many the foundation can keep, but for now > I'm not concerned about us having too many :) the more we get, the more > responsive we'll be. > > As it stands, I think we have two (oldish) Darwin cores on Hydra today, so > when my 4-core box arrives (assuming it works well) it should give us more > than 3x the current power :) I paid $589 for it and another $55 for shipping > from the US. Most of the ones for sale on eBay are the newer (but not > newest) generation and are thus a bit more expensive than the one I got. > > I think we'd be in a reasonably comfortable place if we could get 3 or 4 > more of those boxes, but if we could get more I obviously wouldn't complain. > > I'd love for us to have Darwin be a nearly first-class citizen of nixpkgs, > but potential adopters (and thus contributors) are going to be turned off if > they need to recompile the world if they get anywhere near master. > > > > > On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Christian Theune <c...@flyingcircus.io> > wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> On 22 Dec 2015, at 14:57, Daniel Peebles <pumpkin...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I spoke with Rob Vermaas about donating Darwin machines and we decided >> that the hosted Mac options were indeed too expensive. As far as I could >> tell, the best Mac compute power for the money is a Mac Mini from the >> previous generation (or the one before it) since they had 4-core i7 CPUs >> back then (the more recent ones only have 2-core CPUs and often i5s unless >> you spend lots of money). >> >> I bought one of those older Mac Minis off eBay as a donation to the NixOS >> foundation, and once it ships to them they will manage the machine as part >> of the main Hydra cluster. >> >> It would sometimes be more appealing to host the machines ourselves, but >> unfortunately there are all sorts of trust issues there which we haven't yet >> solved, so I think the best bet for now if you want Darwin Hydra to get >> stronger is either to donate to the foundation so they can buy more (Darwin) >> build boxes, or to donate hardware directly as I did. >> >> >> Thanks. If that’s feasible and works for the guys maintaining the hardware >> at the farm then I wonder: do we have an estimate how many machines would >> make an impact or should we try adding a bunch more? Or just wait for yours >> to arrive? >> >> How much did you pay for the mac mini you managed to get? >> >> Christian >> >> -- >> Christian Theune · c...@flyingcircus.io · +49 345 219401 0 >> Flying Circus Internet Operations GmbH · http://flyingcircus.io >> Forsterstraße 29 · 06112 Halle (Saale) · Deutschland >> HR Stendal HRB 21169 · Geschäftsführer: Christian. Theune, Christian. >> Zagrodnick >> > > > _______________________________________________ > nix-dev mailing list > nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl > http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev > _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev