Development platform?
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
Try partitioning your disc and installing ubuntu on a separate partition. Vista is slow on everything. If you need windows, install 7. If you do well with opensource software, ubuntu+apt is all you need. If you are considering switching your laptop and need something that just works, buy a mac. 2010/9/11 Jeff Greenberg <jeff@ayendesigns.com>:
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
Henrique, I go to Drupal meetups frequently, so I see a lot of Macs (probably more than Windoze) and I can honestly say that once you get past the gee-whiz, they don't seem any faster. And the Mac folks seem to go through a lot more window switching than I do. I'm just going to find a really fast machine and add Linux/VMware (so I can learn it better). Nancy Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. ________________________________ From: Henrique Recidive If you are considering switching your laptop and need something that just works, buy a mac.
Having had the opportunity to see many (particularly dual-core) machines, I have come to the conclusion that most developers (especially Drupal) would do much better with a FAST single processor rather than a plethora of slower multi-cores. For example, the machine I am currently typing on is a 2.1Ghz Centrino/4GB machine and the modules page for my customer's site running here takes 30 seconds to load (or update). On the test machine (quad-3.3 GHz Xeon/16GB), it take 5 seconds. For Drupal, you need a fast processor because it does not multi-task (any flavor). Lots of memory for database caching helps too. The production machine has e-Accelerator, and is even faster than the test machine, even though it is the same type of server, and even though it has a much higher load. So, yes, my advice is to replace the machine. I'm already shopping. Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. ________________________________ From: Jeff Greenberg jeff@ayendesigns.com 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.
On 11 Set 2010 04h44 WEST, 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.
With that machine and modern OS there's no need to buy anything. Windows as a development platform is rather poor. Unless you're developing .NET stuff. Get a UNIX OS. It's older (70s tech) than Windows (80s tech) but a much more solid platform. Completely different approach, the command line is one of its greatest assets IMHO. Install Debian Squeeze and say goodbye to most of your problems. I'm in a machine with less power than yours, running several Drupal dev installs, firewall, MTA, with no problems. I dumped Apache some time ago and run nginx exclusively.
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.
Drop Firefox and get Chromium. The new 6 beta release is a good deal faster than the previous 5.0.375, so it seems. The chromium browser inspector is roughly at par with firebug. --- appa
Two other alternatives: 1. Get an old PC/laptop nobody uses and stick Linux on it, with a minimum LAMP stack and Drupal, make a little network and you're all set. An old laptop would do great. 2. Turn your old clunker into a thin client and get a VPS on Linode or similar and put your head in the clouds. Get a decent internet connection and you're all set. 3. Back up everything, install Ubuntu on your old clunker and run windows in Vbox on top of Ubuntu. It'll still be slow, but not as slow as now (worst alternative). Victor Kane http://awebfactory.com.ar http://projectflowandtracker.com On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 1:11 AM, António P. P. Almeida <appa@perusio.net>wrote:
On 11 Set 2010 04h44 WEST, 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.
With that machine and modern OS there's no need to buy anything. Windows as a development platform is rather poor. Unless you're developing .NET stuff. Get a UNIX OS. It's older (70s tech) than Windows (80s tech) but a much more solid platform. Completely different approach, the command line is one of its greatest assets IMHO.
Install Debian Squeeze and say goodbye to most of your problems. I'm in a machine with less power than yours, running several Drupal dev installs, firewall, MTA, with no problems. I dumped Apache some time ago and run nginx exclusively.
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.
Drop Firefox and get Chromium. The new 6 beta release is a good deal faster than the previous 5.0.375, so it seems. The chromium browser inspector is roughly at par with firebug.
--- appa
Here is a link to instructions I've put together for the development platform I am currently using: http://dev.antoinesolutions.com/free-open-source-php-ide-fedora-13 This setup uses Fedora which has been OK, but I am working on a new development platform for Aegir that will use Debian... not sure when I'll be finished. -- Good luck, Antoine On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 3:44 AM, Victor Kane <victorkane@gmail.com> wrote:
Two other alternatives:
1. Get an old PC/laptop nobody uses and stick Linux on it, with a minimum LAMP stack and Drupal, make a little network and you're all set. An old laptop would do great. 2. Turn your old clunker into a thin client and get a VPS on Linode or similar and put your head in the clouds. Get a decent internet connection and you're all set. 3. Back up everything, install Ubuntu on your old clunker and run windows in Vbox on top of Ubuntu. It'll still be slow, but not as slow as now (worst alternative).
Victor Kane http://awebfactory.com.ar http://projectflowandtracker.com
On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 1:11 AM, António P. P. Almeida <appa@perusio.net>wrote:
On 11 Set 2010 04h44 WEST, 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.
With that machine and modern OS there's no need to buy anything. Windows as a development platform is rather poor. Unless you're developing .NET stuff. Get a UNIX OS. It's older (70s tech) than Windows (80s tech) but a much more solid platform. Completely different approach, the command line is one of its greatest assets IMHO.
Install Debian Squeeze and say goodbye to most of your problems. I'm in a machine with less power than yours, running several Drupal dev installs, firewall, MTA, with no problems. I dumped Apache some time ago and run nginx exclusively.
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.
Drop Firefox and get Chromium. The new 6 beta release is a good deal faster than the previous 5.0.375, so it seems. The chromium browser inspector is roughly at par with firebug.
--- appa
On Sat, 2010-09-11 at 05:11 +0100, António P.P.Almeida wrote:
On 11 Set 2010 04h44 WEST, jeff@ayendesigns.com wrote:
With that machine and modern OS there's no need to buy anything. Windows as a development platform is rather poor. Unless you're developing .NET stuff. Get a UNIX OS. It's older (70s tech) than Windows (80s tech) but a much more solid platform. Completely different approach, the command line is one of its greatest assets IMHO.
Install Debian Squeeze and say goodbye to most of your problems. I'm in a machine with less power than yours, running several Drupal dev installs, firewall, MTA, with no problems. I dumped Apache some time ago and run nginx exclusively.
Apache works fine, I did run Drupal sites on an even slower box than that. Having so much latency (something like 30 seconds) even on a simple 1GH atom is not possible, he must have mysql or apache configuration problems. This is probably not hardware related. In fact, I currently run a Drupal site, with MySQL on a 1Ghz box, with 1g memory, and on the same box are also running a SMTPd, a IMAPd, a Bind DNS server, FTP, firewall, complex routing rules, IRC bouncer, and some other services, and it just works, my Drupal, of course, serves almost only cached content, but that's not the point here. If you are using distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu, keep a 32bit binaries distribution, on Ubuntu some known bugs are still there with memory consumption. Memory consumption is probably what kills a development environment, especially if you are using Linux, the flash player would still run 32bits using the nswpluginwrapper, which cause it to slow your browser as soon as you have flash somewhere. Keep in mind that your memory may be the greatest bottleneck since you are probably also running an heavy IDE (I'm running Eclipse, with a lot of ram, it's really fast, but with few ram, it behaves like hell), developments tools, debugging tools, many web browsers, your mail client, a desktop environment, and a lot of other every day's life junk.
Drop Firefox and get Chromium. The new 6 beta release is a good deal faster than the previous 5.0.375, so it seems. The chromium browser inspector is roughly at par with firebug.
This is a bad advice, if you develop a web application, you should test it on a lot of browser (by the way, FF4 seems to be faster than chrome to start on some environments, and JS benchmarks shows that FF4 is still slower, but not visible for humans beings). The real advice here is keep the browser on which you are comfortable with the best developments tools, this is the best for you, not the fastest one, you have to realize that a lot of people will use browsers slower that yours, and if your site is that slow, it will for all of those people. I would also advice some other practices such as, if you are often enabling or disabling modules, clearing your cache and such, disable the 'update' module, and enable it only when you want to check your contrib modules versions, this module will do webservices call at each first admin pages hit after you enabled or disabled a new module, this call can sometime take up to 20~30 seconds, depending on the distant server availability and your internet connection. Pierre.
On 2010-09-10, at 11:44 PM, Jeff Greenberg wrote:
3Gb of memory
You might want to check memory use; if you are using XDebug it can suck up incredible amounts of RAM.
running Vista.
As mentioned before, another issue. In my experience, on the same hardware, I've always found the LAMP stack to run significantly slower on Windows compared to Linux. With 3GB, I wonder if you're running a 32-bit or 64-bit OS. I've found 64-bit Windows to be a bit faster, while 64-bit *nix will be much faster as all of userland is 64-bit as well. The extra registers in the CPU make a *big* difference.
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 you're running Vista, leaving it less than 2Gb for it is going to lead to problems. My guess is that Vista is doing quite a bit of swapping just to manage itself. That coupled with slower IO for the VM will hurt performance. Try reducing your guest RAM to 1024 MB (or 768). --Andrew
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
One great resource everybody should know about is the Quickstart Project, http://drupal.org/project/quickstart, which provides a completely-set-up Ubuntu instance, with Drupal configured, Apache, Mysql, Eclipse, Netbeans, everything all there out of the box. You can run it in the free Virtualbox environment on Mac, Windows, or Ubuntu. You avoid the speed problems of Windows that way. It's a fantastic resource. -Randy On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 7:58 PM, Allister Beharry < allister.beharry@gmail.com> wrote:
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
-- Randy Fay Drupal Module and Site Development randy@randyfay.com +1 970.462.7450
that looks way to easy ;) </ryan> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Randy Fay <randy@randyfay.com> wrote:
One great resource everybody should know about is the Quickstart Project, http://drupal.org/project/quickstart, which provides a completely-set-up Ubuntu instance, with Drupal configured, Apache, Mysql, Eclipse, Netbeans, everything all there out of the box. You can run it in the free Virtualbox environment on Mac, Windows, or Ubuntu. You avoid the speed problems of Windows that way.
It's a fantastic resource.
-Randy
On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 7:58 PM, Allister Beharry < allister.beharry@gmail.com> wrote:
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
-- Randy Fay Drupal Module and Site Development randy@randyfay.com +1 970.462.7450
sounds like the amazing Drubuntu: http://drupal.org/project/drubuntu On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Randy Fay <randy@randyfay.com> wrote:
One great resource everybody should know about is the Quickstart Project, http://drupal.org/project/quickstart, which provides a completely-set-up Ubuntu instance, with Drupal configured, Apache, Mysql, Eclipse, Netbeans, everything all there out of the box. You can run it in the free Virtualbox environment on Mac, Windows, or Ubuntu. You avoid the speed problems of Windows that way.
On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Randy Fay <randy@randyfay.com> wrote:
One great resource everybody should know about is the Quickstart Project, http://drupal.org/project/quickstart, which provides a completely-set-up Ubuntu instance, with Drupal configured, Apache, Mysql, Eclipse, Netbeans, everything all there out of the box. You can run it in the free Virtualbox environment on Mac, Windows, or Ubuntu. You avoid the speed problems of Windows that way.
It's a fantastic resource.
-Randy
It's quite impressive, I agree. I wish their drush customizations worked better with drupal7, though. That said, I run a Windows box using Windows 7, 64 bit, 4 GB ram and some chip that was new a few years ago. I do most of my development work in virtualbox, either in ubuntu machines I create myself or now using the quickstart instance. The joys of virtualbox is that my machines can be paused - so I can shut down my host machine for the night without having to get everything in place when I start workign again, machines can also be exported and copied to other machines. When I was working on my presentation for Drupalcamp, I did up most of the presentation on my desktop, and then just exported it and copied it to a laptop to continue using all of my pre-set-up examples and all without having to worry a bit. -- John Fiala www.jcfiala.net
I agree with John that it's nice to use vbox. Plus, I -must- use Vista occasionally because of Quickbooks (invoicing) being on it, Ubuntu not playing nice with my CD, skype and a few other things. At the office, I have the luxury of using separate boxes I suppose, but not always. So thus far (thanks all for the replies), it seems that the likely order of my practical options are: stop using firefox, reduce memory to vbox and return more to vista, add memory to the laptop (it will take 1Gb more), try a new VB with either a prepackaged Ubuntu or a completely different flavor of linux. Jeff
In addition to more memory, a fast drive helps quite a bit. I had a nice speed boost after upgrading to a high-performance solid-state drive. I'm guessing that, Vista being more bloated than *nix, it might help even more. --mark On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 2:36 PM, Jeff Greenberg <jeff@ayendesigns.com> wrote:
I agree with John that it's nice to use vbox. Plus, I -must- use Vista occasionally because of Quickbooks (invoicing) being on it, Ubuntu not playing nice with my CD, skype and a few other things. At the office, I have the luxury of using separate boxes I suppose, but not always.
So thus far (thanks all for the replies), it seems that the likely order of my practical options are: stop using firefox, reduce memory to vbox and return more to vista, add memory to the laptop (it will take 1Gb more), try a new VB with either a prepackaged Ubuntu or a completely different flavor of linux.
Jeff
In this case, the drive is not the factor, I think, because there's no paging going on and very little drive activity On 09/14/2010 07:50 PM, mark burdett wrote:
In addition to more memory, a fast drive helps quite a bit. I had a nice speed boost after upgrading to a high-performance solid-state drive. I'm guessing that, Vista being more bloated than *nix, it might help even more. --mark
participants (14)
-
Allister Beharry -
Andrew Berry -
António P. P. Almeida -
Henrique Recidive -
Jeff Greenberg -
John Fiala -
Jon Antoine -
mark burdett -
Moshe Weitzman -
nan wich -
Pierre Rineau -
Randy Fay -
Ryan LeTulle -
Victor Kane