I'm a beginner Drupal programmer and don't have much experience with PHP and such, but do know a lot about HTML and general web programming, and I'm an electrical engineer so I know the ropes and learn fast. I've been toying around with D6 for a while and for the practice and experience I'm rebuilding a real estate website for a friend for free.
I've been doing the development on a local server box which is a 4 year old Dell 1.8G P4 running FreeBSD and the AMP stack and it's slow as molasses. Just waiting for Drupal to respond to refreshing the module listing page for example, can take over a minute. I spend an inordinate amount of time waiting for Drupal to respond and since time is money, I thought I would buy a faster box. I guess that's the big problem with Drupal development - you can't use caching and such to speed things up like you would on a production server.
Problem is I spend half the year in the US and the other half in Thailand, so hauling a tower case across the Pacific every six months is a pain and impractical. I was all set to buy this crazy ass laptop from AVA (D900F) which is a monster machine with an Intel core i7 or a Xeon processor inside - normally only found in desktop boxes. The whole thing would have cost me $3 - 4K+, but now I'm thinking I might be better off just renting a real server on the net somewhere for development. But I don't have a feeling for how fast a typical hosted box would be in development mode. I see AN Hosting offering $7/mo for hosting but wonder how development would be on such a service. I could spend upwards of $50 - $100/ month or more for a VPS, or even a cloud server from S3, for even more money I suppose. I just don't want to click "save" and have to wait ten plus seconds for every new CCK field I add.
The alternative is to scale back and get a refurbed Dell M6400 workstation for under $2K and live with the slower response time compared to the 12 pound AVA gaming Goliath. It would still be significantly better than what I have now and be a lot more portable. I'm used to having the server right next to me - it's so easy to manage it that way. My internet connection in Thailand isn't going to be blazing fast - probably just a garden variety DSL line in fact.
So, should I just splurge and buy the beast, the cheaper Dell, or rent a VPS or use AN Hosting or similar? Yeah, the AVA is wicked expensive but I would save a heck of a lot of time and I wouldn't be dependent on a slow, iffy web connection. AND, I could work by the pool!
...Jeff
Comments
Drupal CPU/HD loading?
I think I've concluded, with advice from some Drupal experts, that developing locally is the best idea, so now to choose the best laptop. Note: I don't care for MACs for several reasons, but I'm partial to FreeBSD (PCBSD) and generally open source software. I can run a Drupal stack either using Acquia's Windows stack, or preferably dual boot and just run PCBSD for everything.
One approach to choosing a laptop would then be to ask this question:
During common development work, what is Drupal doing primarily, CPU/memory intensive or disk intensive tasks?
Submit new CCK field:
Update custom content type:
Update module listing page:
Save new Views configuration:
Update views UI page:
In other words to speed up development, do I throw money at the disk system, ie RAID 0, or SSD, VS throw money at the CPU/memory, ie quad core, duo core, or i7/Xeon?
Tnx, Jeff
Instanced environments
Emphasis mine.
If you were diligent, you could turn off an S3 instance whenever you aren't using it. A top-quality S3 instance is $0.80 per hour... but how many hours are you actually developing? Just turn it off when not in use.
I love having my laptop to work on. I love using Git as my VCS and being able to work offline.
I've got the ThinkPad T61, 2.5Ghz dual core, 4GB RAM, sata hard drive, running on 64bit Fedora. I love it. I am able to run 1 to 3 Virtualbox VM's for cross browser testing and develop simultaneously. The overheating problem I mentioned was caused more of by super intense processes rather than an actual fault in my laptop. The production server is running a much more powerful server to handle 5x the process I was trying to run :)
The only thing I'd want more of is memory. My next laptop will not have a maximum under 8GB.
New computer!
Well, I was all set to buy this monster Clevo D900F laptop for $3200 when I discovered another solution using a very condensed desktop box with a handle so I can carry it around. See the box here:
http://gtrtechcorp.com/
I ended up building my own Intel core i7 box that is reasonably portable at 12 lbs, and 12" X 15" X 4.25" - actually fits in a large knapsack, and only cost me a little over $1100. I still have to haul a 10 lb, 17" LCD monitor around (new ones are less than 8 lbs), but it's all manageable traipsing through airports. The monster laptop is a viable desktop replacement but unless you really need the day to day portability, it's not worth paying $2,000 extra for.
The box has an ASUS P6T ATX motherboard with an Intel i7-920 and 6GB RAM. Twin WD 750 GB HDs in a RAID 0 configuration for extra speed. If you want more you can always substitute some SSDs but at a very large cost adder. Also has a Sony DVD writer. I installed PCBSD (64 bit) with no hardware problems at all. PCBSD has a unique module called "The Warden" that automatically installs a FreeBSD jail that you can build the AMP stack and Drupal install inside. It gets its own IP address and is completely walled off from the rest of the machine - total security. So with this much power you can run a server and do development and surf the web all at once. VERY fast machine on the cheap, for a portable solution.
You can have a look at what AVA Direct offers here (it's the same thing I built myself from scratch, but for a couple of hundred more assembled with a 3 year warranty):
http://www.avadirect.com/product_details_configurator.asp?PRID=14214
It's wicked fast, burns only 120 watts idling (200 watts crunching hard). I used a Radeon HD4850 VGA which is great for gaming but overkill for Drupal development and uses more power too.
So if you're looking for a portable server/development box and don't want to shell out megabux for a MAC (Mac Pro doesn't have an i7 for comparison but the Xeons are off the charts expensive and NOT portable) and be tied into expensive proprietary software, try this route. FreeBSD (PCBSD) if fast, stable and free. OSX is mostly FreeBSD under the hood anyway. Gimp gives you most of what Photoshop does and 99% of what most web developers need, and a vector graphics editor, Inkscape, plus there are several IDEs including Eclipse, Bluefish, and Kompozer (and soon e-Text, the clone of Textmate) available. And of course OpenOffice. All for freeeee! Of course if you're more comfortable with Linux, you can get almost the same basic functionality with Ubuntu (or Kubuntu).
...Jeff