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Well, it all depends on your choice of OS (and background tasks)... those pretty OS interfaces don't come without a cost (prime example, try running Ubuntu 11.10 with Unity vs. GNOME2... the classic gnome interface is wwwwwaaaaaaaayyyyyyy faster!).
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My desktop development PC at work has 12 GB of RAM and I'm running out of memory all the time. Just open Chrome with a few tabs and one or two instances of Eclipse (yikes!). Feels sluggish as hell.
I might not be the standard user, but the 16 GB of my home PC are the absolute minimum I can accept nowadays, 24 GB preferred.
Why close programs when you can just keep them in memory to access them faster? Memory has gotten dirt cheap, I've seen 16 GB for under $60.
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Upgrade your memory to 4GB and use 64-bit OS. This is a bare minimum for a comfort work nowadays.
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My lappy works well enough. Although I want a more powerful machine!
David
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My development machine was plenty powerful.
It was a mainframe.
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The slowest link in compiling is the hard-drive. I've finally upgraded to an SSD drive and am loving compile times on my projects, and how quickly VS loads with it.
I'd get better compile times if I wasn't playing games at the same time on the same machine.
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I actually AGREE 100%, your absolutely right, my god damn hard-drive is so damn slow, :\
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Totally agree. Cannot wait till I can afford an SSD.
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My PC is not half a year old and has only a good HDD because I wanted to wait a little more to buy a SSD. The project folder I usually work on includes 44 separate projects and it still loads quite fast in Visual Studio and compiles the whole thing in about 20 seconds.
The computer has an i7 quad core processor and 16GB RAM. At work I have an i5 dual core with 'only' 4 GB RAM and must say the two computers are worlds apart in their performance. I doubt a little that adding a SSD would still bring another noticable improvement.
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
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That's why you should develop on Linux. I've only got a measly 6GB of RAM but have managed to create a RAM disk on 5GB of it and then compile an embedded Linux kernel on that 5GB ram disk. 4 hours down to 4 minutes
I doubt it. If it isn't intuitive then we need to fix it. - Chris Maunder
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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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