[Catalyst] Re: Development environments and performance

[Dave Rolsky]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, kevin montuori wrote:

>>>>>> "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.

I'm thinking that a sane budget is $2,500 per developer machine (with 
monitor). Is that unreasonable? Do you really need to save a few hundred 
bucks on ram?

> 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.

This is what automation was invented for. At several past positions, I've 
set things up so that development consisted of checking out the source and 
running a "set up my dev env" script that created/updated the database, 
inserted test data, set up any servers needed, etc.

This doesn't require much of the individual dev, and if you have packages 
for your app, the installation part is pretty simple.

That said, I think good developers should have some minimal sysadmin 
skills, and should be comfortable setting up a DBMS or LDAP server on 
their own machine, and difficult installations can be scripted.

> 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.

Well, not if there's a _resource_ issue. If, as J Rockway described, you 
have 40 people sharing one machine, you're probably screwed no matter how 
good your sysadmins are.

> 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.

Presumably that depends on how many devs you have. However, I'd be going 
nuts if I had to deal with other devs changing the database schema, or 
even just changing the state of the data while I'm trying to develop 
against it.

I stand by my position that any place not providing individual 
environments is backwards.


-dave

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