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I have a Windows 7 box where I do development work on before pushing up to a central dev server. The performance on my local machine is holding me back. I like to deploy regularly to check changes however the application refresh takes an age.

I run SQL Server & SharePoint all off the same box. I currently do not virtualizes. My machine spec is as follows:

  • i7 - 2600 @ 3.4 GHz
  • 14GB RAM
  • 500GB Hard Drive (non SSD)

I have the following windows score:

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I imagine the two main answers I will get are:

  • Get an SSD
  • Virtualizes your environment

Would Virtualizing its own speed things up or is the SSD the sweet spot.

Any other advice would be great.

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2 Answers 2

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SSD will bring you outstanding improvements. Your cpu & amount of ram are already excellent so going to a flash memory drive will allow the machine to free itself.

On the other side, you can optimize SQL Server (check out the recovery model, auto growth settings, etc.), Windows Server 2008 R2 (turn off everything uneeded) and SP as well (turn all service application that you're not using, cut off the audit and trace logs (they will swallow most of your hard disk activity).

You can also keep your 500Gb as an alternate disk to avoid cluttering as well your SSD.

Or you can simply add a new SSD, install a single server SharePoint 2010 farm on a VHD or directly on that disk and have the ability to boot on that new environment.

Hope it helps.

Edit : as for virtualization, if it's on your own computer you'll lose some performance vs native host installation. If you can rely on an external virtualization solution, it will obviously free your main environment but it will fully rely on the external provider (be it in house or in the cloud)

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+1 for the SSD.

A single hard drive (I hope it's 7200rpm) will be the bottleneck of your system. If you launch resource monitor, I bet you will often have I/O queue.

14Gb of RAM is large enough. I've run with 8GB most of time, with no specific lag, when the I/O system is performant. Especially, I ran the dev box on a small virtual server, with some RAID 0 disks.

You can still use part of your RAM for some optimization:

In all cases, @Francois Verbeeck's advise are valid and you should really follow them.

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