As I type this out on a second hand 2008 Thinkpad T400 running on an Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 with an upgraded SSD and 8 gigabytes of RAM (the max amount the CPU can take by the way), I start to notice how even with all the upgrades, websites still make this mean machine choke at times. Thankfully, not to the point where it would freeze and set the laptop on fire.
Social media websites and web applications such as Gmail usually ends up causing the spike to 95% CPU usage. While I am going to assume a lot of these companies that develop these websites and web applications have done all they could to optimize their code and one could say that dual core processors are just going out of style since the start of the 2010s as more and more processor intensive features get implemented to add more value to software.
But where does this line of thinking end? Would quad core processors such as the i3 and i5 series (two of which still work just fine even today) struggle to handle a simple web application with how heavy and bloated everything has become?
I'm just glad that I didn't bloat up my website yet, it runs smooth as butter on this Thinkpad.
Which brings me to the notion of using old computers as a measuring stick for application performance. Perhaps running it on the bare minimum system requirements will help you find out if there is anything slowing the application down. Your ultra fast developer rig with an Intel i9 CPU and NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU fresh off the assembly line probably isn't going to show you that.