Best computer for defi / solidity / blockchain development

Xyz Zyx
2 min readMay 1, 2021

Silly I know, however I care about running tests as fast as possible, before I forget what I was testing for.

Project to be tested: build of Sushiswap exchange. About 50 smart contracts with lots of dependencies between them makes a good benchmark

hardhat test

starting from the slowest to the fastest

SLOW: Test Hardware 1:

macbook pro 13 2017 (cheapest model) — cost now ~$500

i5 dual core 2,3Ghz, 8GB LPDDR3

56 seconds

Conclusion: painfully slow but more bothering is the hearing the fans at max noise when the tests were run.

SLOW: Test Hardware 2:

Microsoft Surface Laptop 1 – i7 7200U CPU 8GB RAM — cost now ~$300

52 seconds

Conclusion: painfully slow but there are no fans! + much cheaper than the macbook pro 13 2007

Okish: Test Hardware 2:

desktop
Mac Mini M1, 8GB RAM, 256 GB HDD (cheapest model) — cost now ~$669

~38–40 seconds
noets: CPU at 26% RAM at 75%, HDD at ~200 MB/sec

Conclusion Mac Mini M1: you should try for 16GB RAM if you have the $…

FAST: Test Hardware 3:

Lenovo Legion 5 PRO — 16"

CPU: Ryzen 5800H, 16GB RAM, NVME PCIE x4 something, Ubuntu 20.04 — cost now $2000

34 seconds

Conclusion: wow, beats the mac mini m1 (but costs $2,000 vs $669… )

note: same test performed inWindows 10 on another disk, takes 36 seconds (so Linux is a bit faster than windows)

BEST: Test Hardware 3:

desktop
Ryzen 5600x, 16 GB RAM, nvme 970 EVO 512GB, Ubuntu 20.04 (cost ~$1000)

CPU at 30%. RAM used ~ 700MB

27 seconds

Conclusion: best performance / money…but you’re tied to a desktop

Do you want to contribute to this post with your hardware bencharks ?

If yes, it’s very simple

git clone git@github.com:sushiswap/sushiswap.git

(or https://github.com/sushiswap/sushiswap.git)

cd sushiswap

remove the -verbose argument from the package.json test script

npm install

npm run test

run the test couple of times and post your results in a comment here.

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