[development] Development platform?

[Allister Beharry]

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 at 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
>
>