I'm planning on buying a new PC for programming under Visual Studio 2010. My main other usages are:
Programming under Microsoft Visual Studio.
Running VMWare Virtual Machines.
Probably multi-monitor (if my budget lets me buy an extra one)
Here are my questions:
Do I need to purchase a high performance display adapter considering my usage described above? or a medium-range one will suffice? In general, I'd like to know how much a display adapter could affect my usages?
Which CPU could perform better? Core i7, Core 2 Quad, AMD? I have a limited budget but I really need a good performance and buying a good CPU/MB/RAM is my first priority.
A good video card is not a must have, unless you want to develop advanced 3D with Visual Studio (which is an option after all). WPF and multi-monitor can work on any video card you would buy nowadays.
What is an absolute requirement is 4GB of RAM, just for Visual Studio 2010 alone under Win7 (x64 obviously, since the x86 version cannot use 4GB of RAM). Adding Virtual machines raises that need. This has no up limit since it really depends on how many VMs you're planning to run at the same time and what application will run on them. Add 1GB minimum per VM running Win7, a lot more if they are supposed to run databases, source control or any heavy load application.
Also, for the VMs, it is almost mandatory to have them use separate physical hard drives if they are going to run simultaneously, if you don't you will experience stone age level disk performance for both the host and the VMs (unless it's all on SSD, which I never tried).
Would I be buying a computer for programming now I would definitely buy an SSD to host Win7, VS and the projects, it would really be comfy (my current desktop takes several minutes to boot and load my projects, anything that improves loading is good).
On the CPU side, you might want to spend money on the number of cores rather than the actual speed (frequency) of the processor. All CPUs have decent performance, but your computer may slow down a lot if you're running several VMs on a 2-core CPU.
the i7 chip is a really good one, but I don't think you would gain a lot buy spending big amounts of money on high-end Intel chips. Go for a good price/perf ratio with lots of cores, which for your budget will be a 4-core i5 or a 6-core Phenom II X6 (I personnally would prefer the X6 but I don't want to sound partial).
More generally, if your host or your VMs are meant to run stuff DBs or continuous integration build or source control servers that are accessible to a lot of people, you might want to use another computer as your developping computer, since availability will be important (that means no reboots, avoid hardware and software failures). You might want to buy a good mobo, and an excellent power supply, plus a good tower with sufficiently numerous fans. And you might want to think of what you're going to use for backups.
Edit: this last line almost excludes pre-built computers, since afaik computer makers will almost always include cheap power supply and motherboard even in high-end computers, because those points are not advertised.
Another thing to look for is drive speed. Visual Studio does a lot of writing and reading to disk so get the fastest you can. SSD is ideal.
With the exception of the amazing graphics card, the same rules for gaming setups apply for development environments. The more resources (RAM) the better, move your default Windows page file location to a drive other than the C: drive, use an SDD or if you cannot afford one then try a hybrid 7200rpm / 4GB SSD drive such as the Momentus made Seagate which will not break the bank.
A lot of people agree that with the 64bit era, memory is the new disk. 48GB will cost around $700 at the moment but this will drop rapidly over the coming months due to a better acceptance of 64bit machines than ever now.
Oh and your graphics card, whilst not needing to be a monster, should still be a better made one (by a decent manufacturer) with the most RAM you can afford. 2GB of graphics ram means that you can have a high resolution image, with multiple monitors, without affecting the host machine RAM.
Best thing for a good Visual Studio setup? Money.
i7 or core 2, whichever. I'd go quad core if possible,and I'd use as much money as I could on ram.
The Quadcore AMD processors are also quite good now.
finally, considering 2010 is WPF based, a fast video card would also help, maybe not as much as more ram, but I'd go with something more than onboard video.
I'm running VS2008/VS2010 on a triple monitor setup with a really awful graphics card -- ATI Radeon HD3450. Graphics performance hasn't affected me one bit since I'm just doing simple WPF applications. Your needs will vary if you're doing game development or something more demanding.
I would spend your money on RAM, especially if you're using VMs. And not only do the VMs need memory to run well, they will also need to use the same disk. So either put them on a different hard disk, or go SSD. VS20xx thrashes the drive during compiling, and a fast disk will help you out a lot.
You can really get a great developer machine if you're willing to build it yourself.
Scott Hanselman says:
Jedis build their own lightsabers, so
you should build your own computer at
least once!
He describes how he built GOM (God's Own Machine) here for under $3K, and describes it in a podcast here.
If building your own is a bit beyond your aspirations, you can get some good ideas there about the most important features for a developer, from a Microsoft guru who really knows.
If you can afford it, go for a solid state drive.
I would consider getting a better-than-average video card because you'll need some horsepower to run multiple monitors, since you'll want to take advantage of the new tab tear-off ability in vs 2010 to display code files in separate windows.
I would definitely recommend a 10,000 RPM Velociraptor hard-drive or a pair of them striped because VS is a bit of a hog on IO resources.
If it was me, I'd go with a 6-core AMD Phenom processor and 6GB of Triple-channel RAM to maximize performance. If you're an Intel fan, go i7.
A good read on the importance of hard drive speed from ScottGu's Blog.
Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance
When you are doing development with Visual Studio you end up reading/writing a lot of files, and spend a large amount of time doing disk I/O activity.
Related
Our IT team are going to get our machines upgraded. We are given 2 machines :- One is Quad Core i7 3.4 GHz 64-bit machine with 16 GB RAM. The another one is just an upgraded machine with the spec - Dual Core 2 GHz 64-bit machine with 8 GB RAM. Both have Windows 7 Professional on them.
Now, we are being given these 2 machines and are asked to test and see which one performs better (basically to see if the quad core one performs substantially better than the dual core one).
We mainly use Visual Studio 2010 as the development tool. Is there a way by which we can compare the 2 machines performance using Visual Studio (or any other way).
Is there some some sort of code which I can use to quantify the performance difference between the 2 machines?
Please let me know if you need some more information on this.
Thanks,
Abhi.
I think this one belongs on ServerFault, but I'll give it a shot.
Cores:
Visual Studio won't specifically benefit from multicore processors. To my knowledge, it doesn't use multithreaded compilation by default (though a savvy developer can make this happen through clever launching of MSBuild), so it won't take advantage of multiple cores. However, if the developers are running several apps in parallel - say, Photoshop, Office, etc - VS will be less likely to have to share core time if more cores are available.
Memory
8GB of RAM is plenty these days. I use three different dev boxes, two with 8GB and one with 24GB, and I don't see a significant difference in compilation time or IDE responsiveness. Caveat: if you're working with very large projects, more RAM will improve virtual memory swapping performance. Some large C++ apps out there, with hundreds of source files and embedded resources, can suck up a LOT of compilation time and memory.
Windows 7 Excellent choice.
CPU Clock and on-chip cache speed and size will have the most noticeable impact on performance, as will the amount of on-chip cache.
Also, make sure your video card/chipset is up to date, as that can be a UI speed bottleneck.
In short: RAM and CPU clock - and, to some extent, hard drive speed - are the most important factors.
This article has what appears to be a comprehensive overview of benchmarking processes, but I can't speak to the validity of their approach or the quality of the tools they recommend.
Not sure what you need exactly, but the Windows Experience Index (the one visible for end user) uses an API called WinSAT: Windows System Assessment Tool. The documentation entry point is available here: Windows System Assessment Tool.
Here is an example here: How to get the Windows Experience Index
At work, my PC is slow. I feel that I can be way more productive if I just wasn't waiting for Visual Studio and everything else to respond. My PC isn't bad (dual-core, 3GB of RAM), but there is a lot of corporate software and whatnot to slow everything down and sometimes lock it up.
Now, some developers have begun getting Windows 7 machines with 8 GB of RAM. Of course, I start salivating at this. However, I was told that I "had to justify" why I should get a new machine.
I can think of a lot of different things, but I am curious as to what every one else on SO would have to say.
NOTE: Ideally, these reasons should be specifically related to .NET development in Visual Studio on a Windows machine. This isn't a "how can I make my machine faster" question.
I would ask myself "What am I waiting on?" And then let the answer to that question drive whether or not I felt like I could justify it.
For example, right now, I'm dealing with 90 minute compiles of the project I'm working on. Would a faster machine help that? A little. But, more impactful would be sane configuration management. So, I'm pushing that way (to no avail) rather than to the hardware route.
Bring in a chess clock.
If you are waiting start the clock
when you aren't stop the clock.
At the end of day, total up the time
multiply it by your pay rate,
multiply it by 2000,
and that is a reasonable upper limit as
to the amount of money the company is squandering on you
per year due to a slow machine
Most useful metric: How much time do you spend reading The Onion (or, these days, StackOverflow)?
This is item #9 on The Joel Test:
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
Writing code in a compiled language is one of the last things that still can't be done instantly on a garden variety home computer. If your compilation process takes more than a few seconds, getting the latest and greatest computer is going to save you time. If compiling takes even 15 seconds, programmers will get bored while the compiler runs and switch over to reading The Onion, which will suck them in and kill hours of productivity.
I agree with the "what is holding me up?" approach.
I start with improviing workflow by looking at repetitive things I do that can be automated or a little helper tool can fix. Helper tools don't take long to write and add a lot of productivity. Purchasing tools is also a good return on your time - a lot of things you could write, you shouldn't bother, concentrate on your core activity and let the tool makers concentrate on theirs, whether is is help software, screen grabing, SEO tools, debugging tools, whatever.
If you can't improve things by changing your workflow (and I'd be surprised if you can't), then look at your hardware.
Increase memory if you can. If you're at 3GB with a 32 bit OS, no point going any further.
Add independent disks. One disk for the OS another for your build drive. That way there is less contention for disk access from the OS and the compiler. Makes a difference.
Better CPU. Only valid if you are doing the work to justify it.
Example: What do I use?
Dual Xeon Quad Core (8 cores, total)
8 GB RAM
Dual Monitors
VMWare virtual machines
What are the benefits?
Dual Monitor is great, much better than a single 1920x1200 screen.
Having lots of memory when using Virtual Machines is great because you can realistically give the VM a realistic amount of memory (2GB) without killing the host machine.
Having 8 cores means I can do a build and mess about in a VM doing a build or a debug at the same time, no problems.
I've had this machine for some time. Its old hat compared to an iCore7 machine, but its more than fast enough for any developer. Very rarely have I seen all the cores close to maxing out (pretty much going to be held back by I/O with that much CPU power - which is why I commented on multiple disks).
For me (working in a totally different environment, where JBoss, Eclipse and Firefox are the main resource sinks), it was simple enough:
"I have 2GBs of RAM available. I'm spending most of my time with 1GB of swap in use: imagine what task switching and application building looks like there. Another 2GB of RAM costs 50 euro. Ignoring the fact that it's frustrating working like this, you do the productivity math."
I could have shown CPU load figures and application build times as well, but it didn't come to that. It took them a month or two, but boy is development a joy since then! Oh, and for performance, it's likely you'd do best with Windows XP, but you probably already know that. ;]
Use some performance monitor to determine the cause.
For me its the antivirus has some kind of critical resource leak the slows down IO after a few days requiring a reboot and no hardware upgrades will help much.
The justification will need hard data to back it. If their business software is causing the problem that "this is industry standard" obviously doesn't fly anymore. Maybe they'll realize their business software sucks and fix that instead.
So my laptop hard drive reported a bad cluster last week, which is never a good sign.
I'm going to be shopping for a hard disk, and I may as well plump for the upgrade to Windows 7, which means a reinstallation of Visual Studio and everything else.
This particular laptop has space for two hard disks, so I was thinking about an SSD drive in one and a larger fastish (7.2k) drive in the other.
Where should Visual Studio best go in this arrangement? And what about "special" folders like %TEMP%? Does it make sense to use a ReadyBoost USB stick when your pagefile is already on an SSD? Should the database server and files live on the hard drive? Should I get concerned about the SSD wearing out?
Thanks all...
Do you have an Antivirus with on-access scans activated? If yes, deactivate it for the directory the compiler is installed and the source code, maybe also other areas (have a look at the on-access-scan stats during compilation). That was the main slow-down on my laptop.
Also a bit more RAM might help better also.
I had a look at the exorbitant prices of SSD. I would think twice before investing a big amount in money in something that might not help in the end (that's why you asked the question here, right? ;-) )
If you really need speed, I would buy a desktop and setup a raid-0 partition. Laptops are quite slow. Of course only if you can accept the drawback in mobility...
Make sure you have 2GB+ of RAM. The more the better, as Win7 will use any spare RAM as a disk cache which will probably negate most of the advantage of an SSD. (We have a solution that took 6 minutes to load the first time in VS2005, and 20 seconds thereafter, due to the disk cache).
If you have enough RAM, stick your temp & intermediate folders in a RAMdisk.
Then split your remaining files over the two drives (e.g. apps and pagefile on one, source/object files on the other) to spread the I/O load across both drives. If using SSD, try to use it as a read-only device as much as possible.
I would put OS and Apps on the SSD, lots of reading, little writing. And then put data on the other.
Visual Studio intensively uses disk while compiling. Putting temp and project folders on high performance disk can speed up compiling very much.
My opinion is based on tests using ramdisk.
It stands to reason that Visual Studio (.NET compiling and the IDE) would run better on a $5000 server than a $500 desktop.
Does anyone have experience running Visual Studio in a virtual machine hosted on a server in this price range, with access via RDP? (Assume modern hardware available for the stated prices.)
Obviously, there will be other VMs on that server, but not everyone will be doing intensive tasks such as compiling at the same time, etc. As a starting point, you can assume 4GB of memory and 4 virtual CPUs are allocated to the VM, but feel free to offer other configuration suggestions.
Any insights? How did it work out? I am looking for practical ways to maximize the speed of the compile/run cycle and general IDE performance.
(I'm on the fence as to whether this belongs on Stack Overflow or Server Fault. Since it has to do with Visual Studio and might be of general interest to programmers trying to improve the development experience, I decided to post it here. Please move it if this is not okay.)
If you have a decent multicore processor on your desktop machine it's probably the disk that is a bottle neck. When compiling VS must access many files (in large solutions, multi project). So, I am assuming that CPU is not a problem.
What you can do:
reorganize your projects - if you use copy local then dlls are copied on multiple places (The VisualStudio Project Reference + Copy Local true option is evil!)
buy additional RAM and setup a RAM disk and do your compilation there (beware that if you restart your machine you'll loose RAM disk content - this can be mitigate (stable OS, version control sistem, ...) Speeding up build times dramatically or Speeding up the build – ditch the SSD and go for the RAM drive
buy an SSD disk to do compilation on
It should work out for you; it wouldn't be as good as running it locally on a better machine--but it sounds like it could still be an improvement.
The version of Visual Studio is another large factor, VS2008 has significant performance gains over VS2005.
C# development is also typically less resource-intensive than VB.NET development, since VB.NET runs a background compiler to provide near-real-time feedback about code errors.
And finally, make sure to disable any un-used plug-ins / addins that might be slowing you down.
My team is currently using VS2005 with the following development PCs that are a few years old: XP, Pentium D 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM.
My gut tells me that this is going to be poor hardware for VS2010 development. I am not running VS2010 beta but I am running Blend 3 beta and the performance is bad.
Can you point me to anything that I can show my boss to convince him to buy 6 new machines for my team?
Edit below after initial answer from Jon:
I should have added that my boss wants to upgrade current machines with new hard-drives so I am trying to use this opportunity to take a look forward and see if a HD upgrade is really worth it. This HD upgrade would not just be simple installation of 2nd drive but would replace current drive and would involve backup/restore or reinstallation headaches. There would be the added benefit of 64bit development too, something that we have been talking about.
Betas typically are bad in terms of performance. I know that MS is working hard to improve the performance of VS2010.
However, I have the beta running on my Samsung NC-10 netbook, so it does work on low spec machines.
Do you already find yourself frequently waiting for your machine to catch up? If so, that's the reason to give your manager: you'll be more efficient now with a new machine. If not, wait until VS2010 is out and you actually have it installed (will you even upgrade immediately?) - then if it's too slow, you can show that to your manager at that point.
Speculatively requesting an upgrade doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Given that those Pentium-Ds are dual core processors, I'd suggest:
maxing out the RAM
Windows 7 x64
separate faster HDDs
Those CPUs, while not at the top of the list, are decently powerful. They should handle today's workload of VS2005/2008 without much problems.
It's likely back to the RAM and probably HDD speeds. I know you didn't mention HDD at all, but consider 2 drives (OS and data) an SSD drive instead.
I realize this isn't a direct answer to your question of how to convince your boss to kick out the money, but if that doesn't work, perhaps this will help in terms of getting more performance.
Even though I'm late a little, I guess I need to add that MS is really working hard to improve the performance of VS2010, but they aren't successful here. Using WPF slowed VS 2010 down a lot.
My experience shows that VS2010 has the only drawback, it's slow. Therefore, the developer machine should be based on Nehalem processor core at least and possess 4Gb memory.
Anyway VS2005 is not the best choice. VS2008 is much more mature.