When we first started Wahanda we made the decision to have an all Mac OSX development environment. This has served us pretty well over the last year or 2 and the Mac is a great platform. For those like myself who only gets involved in PHP development with a single windows VM for SQL Server it’s still working great.
However our primary site platform now spans a fair few Java Webapps. Running 2 tomcats + VM’s for IE6, IE8 etc. has got to the point where the standard test-amend-compile-test cycle can be in the order of minutes. This was understandably causing a lot of complaints!
So, we all sat down and had a long discussion about what to do. I would love to be in a position to buy everyone dual quad-core Mac Pros but we really don’t have that sort of money at the moment. So with general agreement we decided to move to a more generic hardware platform running Debian Linux (We did debate using Ubuntu but as the servers are all Debian it was decided to go for consistency).
Chris went away and played with some options and ended up with this spec:
- Asus P5QL Pro Motherboard
- Intel Core2 Quad @ 2.66Ghz
- 2 x Crucial 4Gb DDR2 RAM
- GeForce 9600GT Dual DVI Video
- 2 x 250Gb Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm HDD
- Various cheepy cheep ATX cases
This is at least a doubling of the previous developer MacBooks. 2 more cores, twice the RAM and RAIDED drives rather than the rather pathetic 5400rpm notebook drives from before.
The following diagram is just the 2 tomcats starting up. That capacity really is needed!
This one is building the entire site stack. Doesn’t suck up quite as much as an init of the environment but the spread of load across the 4 cores is great to see.
Overall we’ve reduced the test-amend-compile-test back to only a few seconds. An enormous boost to productivity in the team. The downside was that we lost everyone who made the switch for 2 straight days why they got everything set up.
The marketing / design / copy team are also very happy with their pass-me-down MacBooks. 