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Spec me a dev machine

 
Greenhorn
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Hiya guys/girls

im hoping to get some guidance on the specification of the development machines we have on option to recommend my boss to purchase.

we currently have 3.0Ghz Xeon dell boxes with 2 gigs of ram, which are quite long in the tooth now which makes developing a pain (build times are around 5 mins and depolying takes forever!).

the requirements are quite short, they are:
- machines must be redhat compatable.
- must be from dell (yea i know! but we have some kind of arrangement)
- must make developement with jboss, netbeans and any near future JEE technology seem super fast

the link to the machines we are looking at are
here

so far ive looked at an 3.0Ghz octocore T7400 Nseries with 8 gigs of ram but can one justify a machine like that for JEE development? would it be enough to have just a really fast single quad core mahine with just 4 gigs?

im abit lost atm, cant really justify any of the options as i could also un-justify them (does that make sense?)

so can anyone help me out here, maybe a push in the right direction?

thanks guys!
 
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This is a hard question to get right. Pretty much anything anyone says will be defeated not too far past the starting gate. The only thing I advise is to stay away from laptops. They generate too much heat from circuit packing density, do not use them unless forced. After that I would advise to go with the flow - I split four fast machines to five decent machines so that there will be replacements handy if one fails.

Beyond that just go with the human factors and try not to worry about it too much..
 
Paul Hoang
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Hi Nicholas, thanks for your reply.

well i thought about it this morning and wrote a quick report on the options i thought they have.

i seperated the options in 3 categories (low, medium and high) each being more faster, costly and upgradable then the next.

i so guess ill leave it to the powers that be now. i dont think i can do much about it now.

but thanks on the advice on the laptop, hate the thought of clamy hands from working on a hot keyboard.

regards
 
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Originally posted by Paul Hoang:

the requirements are quite short, they are:
- machines must be redhat compatable.
- must be from dell (yea i know! but we have some kind of arrangement)
- must make developement with jboss, netbeans and any near future JEE technology seem super fast

so far ive looked at an 3.0Ghz octocore T7400 Nseries with 8 gigs of ram but can one justify a machine like that for JEE development? would it be enough to have just a really fast single quad core mahine with just 4 gigs?



More power. Must have more power.
If the PHB will pay for it, go for the octo core. But I think its overkill for a desktop running netbeans. Unless you get completely wacko using J2EE, which is a pig.

I run 12+ hours a day on a dual core with 2GB, doing Netbeans, mysql, servlets, jsps, etc. Its fine. I'd do a quad if my PHB would spring. And more memory is always wonderful.

I think two or three nice 20" monitors is as important as the last drib of octo processor.

Be sure to make sure that the PHB knows that developers need fast machines and that they become obsolete very quickly. If they want you to use this for four years, find another job.
 
Paul Hoang
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Hi Pat,

thanks for your reply. Well we got word from the IT manager and he has approved the medium option (a single quad core intel processor @ 2.83Ghz with 8 gigs of ram with mirrored drives). it gives us the option to upgrade in a few years time with a spare cpu and dim sockets.

thanks
 
Nicholas Jordan
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Sounds to me like these machines should be on a rack. This is greater power than what I would put on a desktop and not worry about someone bumping the machine or something. If your deployment actually needs this much power, then be sure you have a three tier recovery mechanisim in place and actually tested occasionally.
 
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Originally posted by Nicholas Jordan:
Sounds to me like these machines should be on a rack.


I was thinking along the same lines. I'm myself programming on a 2-gigahertz dual core with 2 gigs of memory and I'm more than happy with performance. I'm not running an Oracle/DB2 and Weblogic/Websphere, though.
 
Rancher
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I run on a 2GHz mobility chip and 2Gb RAM and happily have (linux), Eclipse, Tomcat and a bunch of supplimentary apps (email, browser, open office) at the same time.
 
Paul Hoang
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Hi Guys,

well the machines that they chose are machines that should last a while. since you guys have dual core machines and run fine, they are alot modern compared to the 4 year old xeons we have here.

i personally run a 1.8ghz dual core with 2 gigs of ram at home and it does seems to run netbeans and all my other apps with no prob (albeit not deploying any large jee apps as big as ones at work). but would it last as long as four years? not too sure....

regards
 
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