Just to close the loop on this, we got the Mac Studio 48 hours ago, and we’re not keeping it.
It was interesting to watch the Houdini processes. They’d initially jump out to a full 14, run for a bit, then drop to 9, then up to 11, back to 14, and finally settle down to just one. The total compile time was still over 20 minutes, which frankly isn’t a significant time saver for us.
Honestly, it’s probably more economical to just get a single Mac mini with 64GB of memory, or maybe even two or three, dedicated as build machines.
As our needs continue to grow, I think we’ll eventually move towards Greg’s suggestion of building on Linux. One interesting idea was to use APIs to spin up a monstrous DigitalOcean droplet with tons of cores, do the build, and then use the API to destroy it since those big ones are so damn expensive to keep running. But then you hit a whole new set of problems and complexities.
So for now, we’re sticking with a mini or two for our dedicated build machines. Thanks for all the input.
A few of us in this thread are pretty sure there’s something abnormal about your build times - either something in your project which is set up poorly, or some sort of bug in the Xojo compiler itself, or both.
My hunch about this is based having projects of comparable size to yours, with compile times 10x as fast.
Also note that today’s release (2025r2) includes compilation speed improvements. Before you purchase again – or return the Mac Studio – it might be worthwhile to take the new version for a spin and see if it changes your calculus.
Edit: I misread the release notes; there are no substantive compilation speed improvements noted. However, the advice stands, because if there is (as we suspect) some attribute of your project that is causing your compile speeds to be so miserable, it might still be improved or resolved by one of the other fixes in this release.
