Web Development Machines

[samekh]

I am currently developing .NET web applications from a machine w/ these specs:

512 ram
P 3, 850 mHz
2x 20GB HD
TNT2 Graphics card

I am sick of waiting 5 minutes per compile on such small sites, so our department is going to have to make a proposal to the ppl who pay the bills to buy new machines. We are a small business(15 or so employees), but the web dept (3 employees) is an integral part of the business. Going with the top of the line machines may not be super realistic, so i am wondering what all other developers are using for machines, and what other developers would go with if they were in this situation.
Oh, and our primary development environment consists of VS.NET 2003, Photoshop 7.0, and a bit of the Studio MX Suite.
Thanks.

 

[calhoun]

Personally If I was in that situation, I'd try to get the bill payer to allow you to convert to a PHP/MySQL/Apache solution than upgrade the machines.

I think you would find that it would be much better, and they are probebly more likely to approve it.

But if for some reason you cant do that, then I'd try and get the best machine they will buy you

I do my Web Development on my Laptop or PC depending on where I am

Laptop:
Compaq EVO1500V or something along those lines (1.5Ghz Athlon ish, 256Meg DDR, 20Gig HD and WAMP)

Main PC
1.1Ghz Athlon
0.75GB ram (SD )
120Gig HD
CD Rom/CDRW
Unpluged DVD
(dont fear, I plan on upgradeing her soon )

 

[towert7]

Well, it looks like your not into heavy 3d rendering or professional sound development, so basically your just limited to processor power, and the speed of the hard drive. (a cheap radeon 9200 won't hurt though).

A raptor 10k SATA hard drive should do the trick, especially if your under a tight budget.
Also a P4, Dual Xeon, or Amd64 is fine now a days.

What are you expecting they will allow you for money? 2000$US? 1000$US?

Obviously, if they are providing you with the money, get the best possible.

Also, is this just for you or for the 3, or for everyone?

Another thing that is important is the ram. Not so much the speed, but the amount of ram.
If you have say, flash, dreamweaver, photoshop, and visual studio .net running at the same time... you will NEED at least 1gb now a days.

My 4 year old dell is a:
800mhz P3, 28gb SCSI, 8gb SCSI backup, and 786mb of RAM. To me, the only thing i wish i had, was a better processor and the ability to go over 786 mb of ram. The hard drives are still pretty good, SCSI 7200rpm, and my sound and graphics are fine.

My system really shows its age with the new adobe creative suite CS... slow as can be.

P.s. if your under a tight budget, check out a website called www.cyberpowerinc.com They sell dirt cheap computers (even dual Xeons).

 

[marshac]

I use a P4 2.5Ghz with 1GB or RAM.... I just changed jobs, and my new workstation is a 3.2Ghz P4 with 1GB of RAM.

The 2.5Ghz was plenty fast, but when compiling some applications (.net), it would take about a minute. It really wasn't that bad.... the 3.2 is (IMO) overkill, but since i'm not paying for it, I can't complain.

So what kind of specs? I really liked my 2.5Ghz P4 setup... and since those are fairly cheap these days, it has my vote.

As for converting to PHP/mySQL/Apache.... are you crazy man? Talk about the more expensive option (in terms of labor costs) for any medium/large size site. Also, just because PHP is free/open source, that doesn't make it the best choice... check out this article. For the most part, I agree with what they are saying.... and I have used PHP before =)

http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/

 

[towert7]

Dual Zeon:

2ND_USB: STANDARD 2 USB PORT CONNECTORS
CAS: TURBO X-ALIEN METAL CASE NO WINDOW (BLACK COLOR)
CD: SONY 16X DVD-ROM [+11] (BEIGE COLOR)
CPU: Intel Xeon Processor @ 2.4GHz [+959]
CPU2: Intel Xeon Processor @ 2.4GHz [+249]
FAN: INTEL CERTIFIED CPU FAN & HEATSINK
HDD: Seagate 120GB 7200RPM Serial ATA 150 8MB Cache
HDD2: Seagate 120GB 7200RPM Serial ATA 150 8MB Cache [+105]
KEYBOARD: PS2 MULTIMEDIA INTERNET CONTROL KEYBOARD (BEIGE COLOR)
MEMORY: 1024MB PC2700 DDR REGISTERED ECC MEMORY [+149]
MOTHERBOARD: ASUS PC-DL DELUXE I875P 533FSB SUPPORTS DUAL XEON CPU & DUAL CHANNEL DDR333
MOUSE: PS2 INTERNET MOUSE W/ WHEEL (BLACK COLOR)
NETWORK: ONBOARD 10/100 NETWORK CARD
PS: THERMALTAKE 480WATT POWER SUPPLY (SILVER COLOR)
SHIP OUT IN 5~10 BUSINESS DAYS
SERVICE: STANDARD WARRANTY PLUS ONE-YEAR ONSITE SERVICE
SOUND: Creative Labs SB AUDIGY 5.1 W/ 1394 IEEE [+69]
VIDEO: ATI RADEON 9200 128MB DDR W/ TV-OUT & DVI [+9]

This comes out to $1544US, but if you enter the coupon code "instant" they take off 5% and give you free shipping if your order is more then 1000$. So, this comes out to be $1467 shipping included for a DUAL Xeon. Not bad, you supply an OS, and RAID (0 or 1) is a free option if you like. (they also have world class tech support (free 24/7/365 lifetime) from what ive seen. I have bought from cyberpowerinc before).

___________________________________________________

For the same set-up, but with a P4 3.0, your at about $1109 including shipping.
And for about the same AMD64 your at $992 including shipping.

So, for about 1000-1500, you can get a dam good workstation.

 

[Desova]

i use a 1.4GHz AMD with 512Mb RAM which usually does the job fine, though i tend not to have to compile things very often (benefit #1 of php. but its not worth changing the language since that'd mean redoing any sites and retraining everyone) but its probably the absolute minimum you'd want as it does everything (at the moment i'm running media player, photoshop, frontpage, phped and various little things without any problems.

obviously if you use everything at once you'll need to get the fastest processor, fastest drive and most RAM you can afford, simple as that.

 

[Desova]

Originally posted by marshac

As for converting to PHP/mySQL/Apache.... are you crazy man? Talk about the more expensive option (in terms of labor costs) for any medium/large size site. Also, just because PHP is free/open source, that doesn't make it the best choice... check out this article. For the most part, I agree with what they are saying.... and I have used PHP before =)
http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/papers/html/php/

i'm at point 4 now and havent seen anything that doesnt apply to virtually any other language i've come across and that cant be solved with a bit of commonsense, which i guess is something a lot of developers dont have.

php links the coding to the output : well duh, isnt that the point? what the hell does asp/cgi/jsp do then?
working in teams is hard because including files is a nightmate: what the?
you can redefine a function written by someone else: well why would you want to? i bet you can do that in asp as well.
another problem is you cant rely on a host having a particular version of php? i dont know if i should even bother reading the rest because its blatantly just against php because its new and therefor not as professional as the old methods (c, perl, asp)

 

[White Board]

get the biggest and baddest computer money can buy... intel trilithium billihertz, geforadeon 10000, 100k rpm rolls royce predatorator afterburning turbine hd, xradiation bandwidth nic's... then put a wing on it, some ground effects, persian rug size honda stickers, a water fountain, some glow sticks and a ketchup dispenser. that should rev up your development dept, natch. have trillion dollar websites rolling out at a dozen a week!

 

[:LJ:]

Originally posted by Desova
php links the coding to the output : well duh, isnt that the point? what the hell does asp/cgi/jsp do then?
working in teams is hard because including files is a nightmate: what the?

Well, you've obviously never worked on a large-scale system. If you unlink the presentation (the output), the controller (the business logic) and the model (the data layer) then your system instantly becomes more maintainable. Want to change/upgrade your database? No problem. Just migrate the model layer and swap out the access code in the model, and you're sorted. Want to change the business rules? Just change the appropriate functions in the model. No front-end code needs to change. Need to distribute your system over multiple servers for redundancy or performance? Just put each layer on a separate machine.

As regards working in teams, have you ever seen two people working on the same module in a system? You need as much separation as possible, because one has a much greater chance of overwriting the other's changes the more integrated the system is (like PHP/MySQL, where everything's lumped into one).

The fact is, PHP is designed as a solution for smaller systems, and doesn't scale well enough with load, no matter how good your coding skillz are. Sure, it's faster than (for example) JSP and servlets when there are 100 users. Put 10,000 users on it, and things begin to change. Love it all you like, but it's just not viable for large to Enterprise class applications, and that's the POV that this article was written from.

As an example, look at this forum - the Search function is perpetually turned off because of the performance hit. My company hosts and maintains a government system with similar (if not greater) load, running on JSP and servlets (using Resin as the container), with Lucene as the search engine and operating with about 2TB of data. Response times are around 2 seconds maximum (assuming a reasonable connection). Assuming that PHPBB code (I've never seen it) is as optimised as ours, that should say a lot (the hardware is similar, but spread over 3 servers).

Oh, and as regards the original question, for my development I use a Centrino 1.5GHz laptop with 512MB RAM running XP Pro on two monitors. Usually, I have Eclipse, Resin, MySQL, XML Spy, WinAmp (of course) and Trillian running. It only gets a little bit slow when I'm restarting Resin (takes about 30 seconds). I think it cost the company around £1000, but for the added benefit of luggability, I think it's worth it (and those Pentium-M processors are a lot more powerful that their clock speed indicates - I'd compare it to an Athlon XP 2200+ in the way it "feels").

 

[Desova]

I'll admit that i havent worked on any huge projects, but as far as i can see all the problems mentioned for php occur for the rest of the languages as well (sure you can seperate the display, logic and data just as easily with php as you could with asp using classes, includes and functions but most people dont bother). and as long as each member of the team is working on a different part of the system (same as any language) then there shouldnt be a problem. the problem of overwriting someone elses update isnt specific to php. this way the database can be changed easily by changing the database interaction include (though how often does anyone change the database type?)

i dont know how it matches other large systems for performance as i dont have any to compare it to. as for searching i know the fulltext indexing / searching takes a while on php but currently thats the only searching method i've used other than manually checking fields.

 

[:LJ:]

ASP isn't a good example, because it has performance issues, and is interpreted, not compiled. ASP.NET is different, because it's compiled to bytecode (like Java) and runs on a virtual machine. Using code-behind you can separate the front-end and controller code. With JSP/servlets, things go one step further.

AFAIK CGI is the mother of all performance hogs, because each new user fires up a new runtime session (not HTTP session) on the server, rather than new classes within a single runtime process, so it will consume considerable more resources.

And it's very common for large projects to change the back-end technology and middleware as they grow from prototype to production system to maintenance and upgrades.

 

[calhoun]

How much control will you have over the deployment platform? PHP’s one-size-fits-all approach to the php.ini file makes it hard to share servers with sites that were developed with different settings.

really this is not a good argument, since especially on apache, you can have a virtual ini file by adding it to a .htaccess.

I agree that team work could be problematic. but this is nothing new. Useing OOP could cut down on the risk.

How long will the site be expected to last? The longer it lasts, the more likely it is that significant design changes will be needed. If you use PHP in the obvious manner, major design changes are difficult. If you extend PHP with a templating system, whether ad hoc or carefully enforced, using PHP buys you little if anything.

As for Content Seperation from Code: how about this Forum
If PHP buys little or nothing from templateing what do other systems do? Magically make it work better ?

I will agree that the simplicity of the language can be both advantegous and disadvantegous.

As to me being crazy: yeh most of the time

 

[:LJ:]

Originally posted by calhoun
As for Content Seperation from Code: how about this Forum
If PHP buys little or nothing from templateing what do other systems do? Magically make it work better ?

No, but the point is that if you need to extend PHP with a templating system, you may as well use a platform/language that doesn't need one because the effort of doing so negates the simplicity of PHP compared to another language that doesn't need this.

 

[calhoun]

At the end of the day, unless Im missing something in your Processing code your going to have to do something like:

eval($mytemplatecode);

or something along those lines, wether it be a self built template system such as vB's or be it PHP's smarty (admitedly I wouldnt use that).

I dont follow how useing some other system would make it possible to get around this ?