On: Friday, March 07, 2008 8:06 PM Arno Garrels wrote:
> > I'll second the "Virtual Machine" part. I've been doing all of my > > development on VmWare Workstation for the last few years, and it's > > *REALLY* good. > > I played with the same idea as well, did some serious testing on new > hardware > bought for that purpose exclusively, however I just decided to not > virtualize > my main development environment since running in a VM is a little bit > slow. If you run D7 in a VM that's fast enought, however with Rad- > Studio 2006 > I don't want to lose any performance. Anyway get plenty of RAM, fast > HDDs to > store the VMWare images (they should be on different physical drives > anyway), > run the VMs with the Player, it provides much faster GUIs than VMWare > Server. Unfortunately you cannot install both Player and Server on the > same > machine. I also tried Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 64 bits as the host OS in > order to > save one more M$ license and used the ntfs3-org filesystem driver to be > able > to access images created on a windows box, that driver worked reliable > however > was a bit slow since it is still compiled with debug code. About RAM: Yep, you can't have too much RAM. My "host" machine runs an 64 bit OS and has 8 Gb of RAM (thank god for the drop in prices for the non-ECC 2GB DDR2 modules!) About HDD: VmWare's HDD and Network drivers are very effective, you're not losing too much performance by keeping your Virtual Machine images on "ordinary" HDD's. I measured the difference and the performance loss is about 10% - not a big deal really (note: I tested with my own home-grown Delphi application that simply writes a 8Gb file and then reads it back - probably not the best test). If I had to choose between a 4Gb RAM machine with RAID-0 Raptor HDD's and a 8Gb RAM machine with an ordinary HDD, I'd go for the 8Gb of RAM. But then again having both RAM and the fast HDD is better. About performance: How did you measure the performance, and did you use a "dual CPU" virtual machine? Vmware seems to have a bug in the Graphics driver and it causes display refreshes to be painfully slow on dual-cpu VM's. My VM only has one CPU for this raison. _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> Delphi@elists.org http://lists.elists.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/delphi
