No idea what to do for Xcode

[thefredelement]

I have a 4,1: 2x 2.93, 48GB RAM, 512GB SSD RAID 0 on a Sonnet Tempo Pro and an HD7970 with 3GB of RAM.

I'm an app developer and I've been working on bigger projects lately, my workflow is to have any or all of the following apps open for reference & work.

Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, Xcode, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Slack, Chrome, Messages.

Xcode seems to constantly choke lately (building is taking a while, auto-completing sometimes just dies all together, having multiple windows open - esp. storyboard or xib files is like a lesson in patience). Sketch since 3.4 has gotten loads better but with a lot of art boards and bitmaps it drives me crazy with beach balls.

The system is really never under despair, either CPU nor memory wise though I wish it would be - it feels like it can do so much more than it's being fed.

I know some of this is a) most likely some of my less than stellar code the compiler is choking on, b) Xcode itself and c) the Mac?

Do you think swapping out Xeons will give me a big enough boost or do you think I should switch to the latest iMac or set some time limit for a new Mac Pro to be released?

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Sounds like you have a bottleneck somewhere, and I'm pretty sure it's not the CPUs. Are your application data / project files on a separate hard drive?

Also sounds as though you've fired up activity monitors to look for hardware utilization levels, and found nothing there.

I would check console.app for anything related to the Xcode and Sketch crashes next.

Check your disk health status with TechTool pro and / or diskwarrior.

 

[goMac]

Xcode has had some bad releases, but I don't think there is anything to do that could improve that machine. Memory and disk bandwidth seem like the problems to me, both of which can't be upgraded any further. CPU is probably not what's holding that machine back, neither is the amount of RAM.

A new machine is going to be the only way forward. But like I said, Xcode hasn't been behaving that well recently, so I can't promise a new machine will lead to a lag free Xcode.

 

[ScottishCaptain]

What version of Xcode are you running? How "big" are these projects you're working on?

Without that information, any reply is going to be pure speculation.

From personal experience:

• Projects with more then 1000 source files is going to be slow in any version of Xcode. I've worked on a project that had 3500 files. It took forever for Xcode to index everything, and some multiple of 10 minutes (usually 20-30) to compile on a 12x2.93ghz machine. Changing header files and watching Xcode try to index everything again for the umpteenth time was a really harrowing experience.

• C++ code tends to require more resources to index and navigate around (when you're looking things up by symbol with the CMD key + right mouse click). Likewise, strange things happen with C++ when your code contains any kind of syntax error, which tends to break a lot of other things until you fix it.

• Xcode 6 is almost universally slower then Xcode 5. At least it generally works.

• Xcode 7 is probably the buggiest piece of crap Apple has released in a while. I have yet to meet an individual with any machine, new or old, who is successfully using it for any kind of project with more then 50 source files. Random issues include high CPU usage for no reason (but resizing random parts of the GUI can sometimes fix this), autocomplete going to la-la land until you restart it, the compiler missing important files (at which point the linker complains about missing symbols), custom rules and scripts not firing off properly, etc. I spent about two days filling out bug report after bug report, and not a single one has been acknowledged or closed as a duplicate.

TLDR; it's probably not your machine. Xcode has been going downhill for a while now. Buying a new computer isn't going to fix shoddy code practices and incomplete software released by Apple.

-SC

 

[thefredelement]

I'm in Xcode 7, it's about 80 files of Swift 2.1. I see the exact behavior you describe. I tried the same project on a brand new MacBook Pro 15" and it built in around the same time. I didn't have enough time to see if auto complete randomly failed. One thing that was noticeable was loading Storyboard and xibs flew where mine beach balls for a few seconds.

My black magic results are 724.7 write & 851.1 read. I didn't bother closing other apps to run the test but that seems like it should be pretty sufficient.

I hope they get Xcode up to snuff sooner rather than later.

What version of Xcode are you running? How "big" are these projects you're working on?

Without that information, any reply is going to be pure speculation.

From personal experience:

• Projects with more then 1000 source files is going to be slow in any version of Xcode. I've worked on a project that had 3500 files. It took forever for Xcode to index everything, and some multiple of 10 minutes (usually 20-30) to compile on a 12x2.93ghz machine. Changing header files and watching Xcode try to index everything again for the umpteenth time was a really harrowing experience.

• C++ code tends to require more resources to index and navigate around (when you're looking things up by symbol with the CMD key + right mouse click). Likewise, strange things happen with C++ when your code contains any kind of syntax error, which tends to break a lot of other things until you fix it.

• Xcode 6 is almost universally slower then Xcode 5. At least it generally works.

• Xcode 7 is probably the buggiest piece of crap Apple has released in a while. I have yet to meet an individual with any machine, new or old, who is successfully using it for any kind of project with more then 50 source files. Random issues include high CPU usage for no reason (but resizing random parts of the GUI can sometimes fix this), autocomplete going to la-la land until you restart it, the compiler missing important files (at which point the linker complains about missing symbols), custom rules and scripts not firing off properly, etc. I spent about two days filling out bug report after bug report, and not a single one has been acknowledged or closed as a duplicate.

TLDR; it's probably not your machine. Xcode has been going downhill for a while now. Buying a new computer isn't going to fix shoddy code practices and incomplete software released by Apple.

-SC

 

[haralds]

I have a 4,1: 2x 2.93, 48GB RAM, 512GB SSD RAID 0 on a Sonnet Tempo Pro and an HD7970 with 3GB of RAM.

I'm an app developer and I've been working on bigger projects lately, my workflow is to have any or all of the following apps open for reference & work.

Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, Xcode, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Slack, Chrome, Messages.

Xcode seems to constantly choke lately (building is taking a while, auto-completing sometimes just dies all together, having multiple windows open - esp. storyboard or xib files is like a lesson in patience). Sketch since 3.4 has gotten loads better but with a lot of art boards and bitmaps it drives me crazy with beach balls.

The system is really never under despair, either CPU nor memory wise though I wish it would be - it feels like it can do so much more than it's being fed.

I know some of this is a) most likely some of my less than stellar code the compiler is choking on, b) Xcode itself and c) the Mac?

Do you think swapping out Xeons will give me a big enough boost or do you think I should switch to the latest iMac or set some time limit for a new Mac Pro to be released?

Your system configuration should be fine.
Try cleaning the caches. Cleaning the project does not remove everything. There is a folder in /var/folders (don't remember the exact one, look for a change on using Xcode) that is also used - you might have to delete that and reboot.

 

[handheldgames]

xcode 7.1 is as you describe it on a rMBP. 7.0 wasnt quite as bad. any variant of xcode 6 is noticably faster all around.

beach balls are possibly coming from your array. a pcie ssd may eliminate the issue as i dont see the issue on my cmp. i boot from a 1tb x4 apple ssuax ssd and build on an apple 512gb ssubx ssd and have no beacball issues whatsoever. jumping to apples new storage tech gave my cmp a huge boost in compiling / xcode performance.

for comparison, im running a 2009, 48g ram, 3.46 6 core cpu. with apple pcie ssd's, sata3 ssds, and hard disks.

 

[thefredelement]

Thanks for the post - I've wanted to try a few those blades for other reasons, I guess I'll pull the trigger sooner and see what happens .

Your system configuration should be fine.
Try cleaning the caches. Cleaning the project does not remove everything. There is a folder in /var/folders (don't remember the exact one, look for a change on using Xcode) that is also used - you might have to delete that and reboot.

xcode 7.1 is as you describe it on a rMBP. 7.0 wasnt quite as bad. any variant of xcode 6 is noticably faster all around.

beach balls are possibly coming from your array. a pcie ssd may eliminate the issue as i dont see the issue on my cmp. i boot from a 1tb x4 apple ssuax ssd and build on an apple 512gb ssubx ssd and have no beacball issues whatsoever. jumping to apples new storage tech gave my cmp a huge boost in compiling / xcode performance.

for comparison, im running a 2009, 48g ram, 3.46 6 core cpu. with apple pcie ssd's, sata3 ssds, and hard disks.