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All dev work is done on virtual machines. I use Oracle Dirtbox running Ubuntu for my server work. I currently have three VM's running.
My Win7(64 bit) desktop is used for hosting the VM's, e-mail and CP.
In the corner is the most important piece of kit in the office, my microwave BACON crisper and that is the only thing that's under-powered - 4 rashers is just not enough.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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It's not so much that my machine isn't fast enough, but the virus scanner my company forces me to use eats up my machine for at least an hour a day, especially when checking for updates. When the HD-light of the PC turns on permanently, I know it is time for a cup of coffee. Very frustrating...
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My XP work laptop "should" be more than fast enough, but corporate layers of bloatware hog memory and cpu resources. At any given time these apps exist in my task manager that use 200 and even 300 MB of mem usage... ?! I know this stuff is 'needed' av/fw/etc but just sayin'
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Define 'needed'. iTunes installs little 'helpers' for the iPhone I don't have and the iPod that I never connect to this computer. And don't even get me started on Skype.....
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Yes I hear you - I put 'needed' in quotes as it's a corporate machine, and I'm bound by policy not to modify any of their autorun stuff (junk?  )...
My home machine is a lower spec than work machine but runs much quicker as I keep autostart and such as clean as possible, use efficient av/hips/fw, etc.. and of course avoid itunes and other bloatware
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Seconded - the task manager processes list is three times as long as my home machine's. It seems like every corporate software vendor has an advocate in the IT group. If the machine slows down it's because of some scan. The VPN setup makes the network shares unusable.
On the hardware side the machine has a 80G HD - on a year-old machine! I spend time carefully removing every unneeded file to avoid filling it up.
Dev machines aren't slow - IT policy hacks are slow.
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Amen to that!
Follow my mission to create a business application in LightSwitch at: http://therearefourlightswitches.blogspot.com
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Try compiling the massive Google Chromium project.
It is amazing to see how well the Microsoft Visual Studio compiler scales with better hardware... I have tested older dual core Xeon workstations with 4GB RAM that take several hours to compile the Chrome project... and 16 core workstations with 32GB RAM that compile the project in well under 30 minutes.
Best Wishes,
-David Delaune
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There is a special VS Achievements award for that! 
Ideological Purity is no substitute for being able to stick your thumb down a pipe to stop the water
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I think the point is simply that it's never good enough. Regardless of being software or web development, there's always that hiccup or extra time your machine takes for updates or a background process, or simply the time it takes to compile your project, at one point or another we get frustrated because it's wasting our time. Having been on multiple cores, numerous gigs of RAM, i5 and i7 processors, solid state drives, that moment of frustration always happens!
I've found the least amount of frustration when using my Dell workstation packed with an intel i5, with 8gb ram, and solid state drives and this is by no means the performance ceiling but its a good baseline to start with.
Save yourself the trouble by disabling anything that might disturb you such as auto software updates, scheduled maintenance jobs during work hours, indexing services(or exclude directories). It also help to offload database services to an actual database server so it doesn't eat all of your precious local memory.
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When I first started writing software, it used to take five minutes to compile a 300 line program. Now my computer trots through my whole application written in C (30,000 lines) in a few seconds for a full build, and rebuilding a small change takes 0.7 seconds. Maaaan I'm happy!
But it's a different story building android applications.... a man could grow old just waiting for the android emulator (written in Java, I think) to start up. Like, minutes.
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so he understands why it matters. So we all got these spanking new quad core machines. And if we want to run on the server it's so fast you think it failed. And Incredibuild to use everyone else's processors if we need them. Wow. You can compile the whole project in 15 minutes - it used to run overnight.
------------------<;,><-------------------
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(*Whoever supposed that should be forced to use a 286 to run VS 2010  )
I've always been at least (n + 1)86 ahead of my target audience. Yeah, that was back in the 80s/90s. Now I just buy the machine with the most memory and fastest hard drive, and hope it doesn't catch fire in the first month.
- S
50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Code, follow, or get out of the way.
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Performance is something we test on 'normal' machines....
The DEV PC is high-end,because you need plenty of memory do do some smooth developing.
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Not even close to the truth when your target is a embedded system.
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That's only valid iff the application you're developing is comparable in system needs to what your development environment gobbles down. That might've been true a decade ago for VC6; but since then the VS team has picked up Gordon Moore's gauntlet and seems likely to win the fight.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: for VC6
Nailed it!!
Maybe this will come back around when we start developing mobile apps, on mobile devices.
- S
50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
Code, follow, or get out of the way.
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I do part time progrmming for work on my own home PC (~1.8Ghz single core, 1G Ram, 80Gig hard drive (close to full).
A while ago my boss asked me to do some extensions to an application. I told him I needed a new PC (sick of waiting for apps to compile). He said ok but once you have finished the project, hence he is still waiting.
___________________________
Here come the machines!
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This will probably get buried, but it needs to be said.
When a developer builds on a powerful system, there will invariably be lost opportunities to work on performance gains. Virtualization is one of very few instances where I would think big iron would be necessary.
Consider if certain bloated libraries are really needed, for example. If it's appropriate, you may get all the functionality you need by rewriting a very small portion of a huge library, yes you're reinventing the wheel a bit, but you also get a performance boost that you wouldn't care about gaining on a high powered machine.
Granted performance isn't everything -- security and stability come first -- but it's one of the reasons (aside from poor tech support) why clients get frustrated. A developer should never expect a client to use similar or better hardware unless we're talking about a game or high-end utility where such performance is an absolute requirement.
Overbuilding and building wisely aren't the same thing.
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We used to use virtual machines to 'pre-test' our development. This pointed out any performance issues soon enough as well as any integration problems etc...
Developers often open up a lot of applications at the same time (I do in any case) which tends to munch away memory and cpu.
V.
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V. wrote: Developers often open up a lot of applications at the same time (I do in any
case) which tends to munch away memory and cpu.
Users often open up more. Once had a user who would open up around 8-12 Word documents of 60-90 pages and would then complain about the VB application he need to run being slow.  That all on a machine with 2GB RAM.
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Jan Steyn wrote: 8-12 Word documents
That's not much .
I often have 3 or 4 IDE's (VS2010) open, several word documents, SQL editors, IE's, virtual machines, our own applications and office documents open. Occasionally some photoshop sessions too.  ...
V.
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Eksith wrote: A developer should never expect a client to use similar or better hardware unless we're talking about a game or high-end utility where such performance is an absolute requirement.
requirements are verified in the various phases of product testing. in order to do proper developers will tend to run some memory and cpu intensive applications in order to properly develop an application.
as if the facebook, twitter and message boards weren't enough - blogged
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That's a terrible way to solve a problem and totally discounts the cost of a developer's time.
Give the devs the fastest machines you possibly can. Then, setup a test machine on the crappiest machine you feel the need to support, specify your performance goals, and test (or even debug) against the crappy machine to fulfill these goals.
But don't waste salaries on compile time.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: But don't waste salaries on compile time.
 +5
/ravi
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