Re: string length on Mac

> Valgrind is a good tool, but you need an extreme amount of "spare"
> horsepower to run it. That's one of the reasons I keep a trusty old HP
> z820 around. 24 physical core and 120 physical GB of RAM. If I get in
> a Valgrind situation, that's the machine I use. I also use it for
> Yocto builds for the same reason. You can find them online pretty
> reasonable now because the CAD workstation people have moved on to
> dramatically more expensive machines.
> 
> Just my 0.0002 cents.

Those Sandy Bridge Xeons have had a very long life; mostly, due to 
Intels very minimal year over year improvements [until recently!], if 
you had one of these then you wouldn't miss anything really important:

1) AVX, AES, etc. enabled.
2) Lots of cores.
3) Quad memory channels.

And Intel sold a ton of them, and even today, they still hold their 
ground although the case is tougher now, with AMD chips quite literally 
giving you a quarter kilo-cores to play with on their server chips 
[can't wait for *those* to get to Ebay ;-)].

But the price is right.  Ebay workstations with xeons from that era go 
for a song, if anyone is looking for a box with lots of ram that isn't 
breaking the bank <$250 or so then look for those SB or IB Xeons!

Only downside is the single thread performance isn't great compared to 
recent chips, which are now hitting 5GHz in turbo.

   -- JVZ