[development] Development platform?

[nan wich]

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 at 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.
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