Firefox can and does peg the CPU on Windows for no apparent reason after a while. Try killing Firefox and working without it and see how it is. But 3 GB is not enough for Vista. A developer machine should have a minimum 4G RAM and ideally 8, especially if you're running a VM. I run a Linux image inside VirtualBox too for development and I don't get any performance issues on my quad-core with 8GB. Although it doesn't eat up as much resources as Windows, a full GNOME or KDE desktop environment is very heavy, especially with all the stuff Ubuntu must pack in. If you don't use a graphical environment your Linux image memory requirements will barely scrape 512MB. I use mostly ssh + screen + vim and although the learning curve is high I'm now very productive with them. Allister. On 10 September 2010 23:44, Jeff Greenberg <jeff@ayendesigns.com> wrote:
I'm curious to hear what others are using as a development platform. I'm dying a slooooooow motion death on mine. I have a 2GHz dual-core laptop with 3Gb of memory running Vista. I decided I wanted to develop on Linux, so I'm running Vbox with Ubuntu 10.4 as the guest, with 1.5Gb of memory and 50Gb of disk (only using about 8) alloted to it.
As I type this message, the letters appear a second or two after I've typed them (thankfully I'm a touch typer and it buffers). Don't even ask about running update.php or bringing up the modules page...several minutes each. In looking at the resource monitor, it's not memory (no paging is going on) but the CPU is pegged. All I have running is firefox, chrome and thunderbird at the moment. Jedit, which is much lighter than JavaBeans, etc., runs painfully slow too.
So...ANY ideas (short of tossing the laptop and buying a real workstation) would be greatly appreciated!
Jeff