[Catalyst] Re: Development environments and performance

[kevin montuori]

>>>>> "DR" == Dave Rolsky <autarch at urth.org> writes:

 DR> * dev is one box per dev, with the best hardware affordable - nowadays
 DR> * that means at least a dual core machine with 4GB of ram and decent
 DR> * disks.

"at least" 4 GB of ram?  crikey.  

 DR> Shared dev machines made sense about 10 years ago, but any place
 DR> still using them is hopelessly backwards (err, like my current
 DR> employer ;)

i'd have to disagree.  if you have a bunch of junior developers
writing code, a shared (to some extent) development environment can
aid in enforcing good development habits.  it also allows them to work
more on development than systems or database administration.  never
mind that it's asking a lot to make programmers (of any skill level)
DBA their own oracle instances, LDAP servers, or, god forbid,
siteminder installations.

my suspicion is that in shops with poor shared development
environments, the systems administration is more to blame for the
suitability issues than the fact that the environment is shared.
having sysadms who are sympathetic to the development process is
certainly a requirement, as is having pretty fast request turnaround
time. 

catalyst allows for a particularly nice sandbox though, using the
devlopment httpd.  we're having a lot of luck providing a (robust, but
not 4GB per devloper!) shared dev/sandbox environment with each of 8
or so developers running a dev httpd.  we then releasing code to
integration for regression testing.  i'm certainly not seeing the
performance problems that have been reported on this list.


cheers.
k.


-- 
kevin montuori