Developer workstation spec

tobsey

I'm primarily a .Net developer and my workstation is starting to struggle. If I have more than three instances of Visual Studio and SQL Management studio the machine starts to stutter.

Current spec in this one is:

• Windows 7 Professional
• Intel Core2 Duo 3GHz
• 4GB Ram (3.5 GB usable)
• 32-bit OS

My main problem seems to be that the RAM gets maxed out so I'm thinking that 64-bit with 8GB Ram is the minimum but I'm just wondering what else people have got recently

seamus

Dev spec in our place now is an 8-core 64bit machine, 16GB RAM, with 256GB SSD primary drive and a 1TB HDD secondary drive.

I have a dev specced laptop which is basically the same, but a quad core, 8GB RAM and no secondary storage.

You will gain a lot upgrading to 64bit, a RAM upgrade, and even a small SSD to use for your pagefile/scratchfile.

Beano

A RAM upgrade will definitely help. 4GB is just unusable. How much free memory do you have when you have a couple of instances of Visual Studio open? It must be going to disk by that stage. Upgrade it to 16GB. Dont bother with 8GB. you will notice an improvement with 8GB but the price difference between it and 16GB is negligible. And a big YES on the 64bit OS. Not much point upgrading the ram if you dont.

Lemming

The other thing I'd note ... that CPU is going to slow you down; it's old and quite dated at this point. If you're running quite a few different instances of VS combined with SQL Server & probably Management Studio, that's a lot of juggling of CPU time. I'd be angling towards an Intel i5/i7 or an AMD FX cpu with 16GB ram, preferably with an SSD in the mix.

My current work machine struggles tbh and it's an i5 with 8gb ram running win7. The last place I worked we upgraded to i7/16gb ram/SSD+HDD machines (win7) and had no issues (we were running multiple VM dev environments) in combination with Visual Studio, SQL Server Management studio, etc. My rig at home is an AMD FX 8-core beastie with 16gb ram/SSD/HDD running on win8 and it's fine.

magooly

My workstation is
Win7 64Bit
16GB ram
SQL server Mgt Studio
SQL server express
JEE stack

and still.. I have to restart the SQL server service due to out of memory several times a day.

Have looked into limiting the memory allocated to SQL Server but the guys in M$ have said SQL Server takes what it can get its hands on, regardless of what you limit it to. Their recommendation is to have a dedicated SQL Server machine.. as if that is practical in a dev env.

All team members have the same issue and have independently looked into solutions.. but alas we just shout moan and learn to live with it.

Lemming

magooly wrote: »

Have looked into limiting the memory allocated to SQL Server but the guys in M$ have said SQL Server takes what it can get its hands on, regardless of what you limit it to. Their recommendation is to have a dedicated SQL Server machine.. as if that is practical in a dev env.

Never had that issue with SQL Server. Have had more issue with Sharepoint swallowing memory than SQL Server. In fact I've had the exact opposite to what you describe where I've had to allocate more memory to SQL Server to allow execution of particularly demanding SSIS packages run to completion on my local machine.

seamus

magooly wrote: »

Have looked into limiting the memory allocated to SQL Server but the guys in M$ have said SQL Server takes what it can get its hands on, regardless of what you limit it to.

That's just plain not correct...

SQL Server by default is configured is to consume all of the memory that it can find, but you can limit it.

Open up the Management Studio, right-click on the server name (i.e. localhost or whatever) and select properties.

Click memory in the left-hand list and you'll see the max server memory is set to 2PB. Change this value to something more sane like 4GB and reboot.

Presto. Note that this limits the buffer pool size - SQL Server can still consume additional memory for other tasks like indexing and queries, but if these persistently take up more space than the buffer pool, you're doing something weird.

If for some strange reason that's not working, maybe look into setting up a dedicated SQL Server VM that you can run locally.

magooly

seamus wrote: »

That's just plain not correct...

Open up the Management Studio, right-click on the server name (i.e. localhost or whatever) and select properties.

Click memory in the left-hand list and you'll see the max server memory is set to 2PB. Change this value to something more sane like 4GB and reboot.

Presto. Note that this limits the buffer pool size - SQL Server can still consume additional memory for other tasks like indexing and queries, but if these persistently take up more space than the buffer pool, you're doing something weird.

If for some strange reason that's not working, maybe look into setting up a dedicated SQL Server VM that you can run locally.

Thanks like I mentioned ive tried tuning it in exactly this way and although i have limited it it gets ignored.

Its a known issue

amen

Thanks like I mentioned ive tried tuning it in exactly this way and although i have limited it it gets ignored.

Its a known issue

really ? I've configured 10's of SQL Server installations never had this issue. Got a MS KB article on it?

Their recommendation is to have a dedicated SQL Server machine.. as if that is practical in a dev env.

Totally practical. You have a single dev SQL Server shared by all devs.

tobsey

Thanks all for the tips, I actually have 2 instances of SQL Express running on my machine so I dropped them down to 256MB memory each. I rarely use them though because we have servers running SQL but I use them the odd time for playing. Dropping them down hasn't made much of a difference though.

I've seen the following machine from HP:

Intel Xeon Quad Core E3-1225v3 (8M Cache 3.2Ghz)
16GM RAM
1TB HD and 128 GB SSD
Intel HD Onboard Graphics P4600

That's 1400 give or take so just wondering if anyone has any comments before I submit a request.

magooly

amen wrote: »

really ? I've configured 10's of SQL Server installations never had this issue. Got a MS KB article on it?

From browser history:

http://www.eraofdata.com/understanding-and-configuring-sql-servers-memory-settings/

“The key thing to remember is that the ‘max server memory’ setting is a misnomer and only accounts for the memory assigned to the buffer pool. Memory assigned to threads, linked server queries, the CLR and a host of other processes utilise memory from outside the buffer pool.”

Thats my teams experience on SQL Server Express locally and it looks like the OP has similar woes.

fergalr

Before my current role, I had a big desktop (working from home) with SSD, RAID, amd 6core etc.

But at my current role, devs use top spec 15" Macbook Pro (16GB ram etc) - and it works surprisingly well. There's enough grunt in the Macbook to do everything I've needed - which surprised me. It's also really nice to always have access to my full environment in a portable way, for showing demos of what I'm working on at meetings etc. The Apple monitors are basically docking stations these days, just plug in power and [whatever that cable that goes into the displayport is called? thunderbolt?] at the desk and everything works.

The only thing that I don't like is the lack of RAID - ever since I read a Joel On Software article about this years ago, I've been in favor of RAID for any dev machine - without it you lose a lot of state if a HDD crashes. (Yes, in theory my setup should just be orchestrated from Git; but in practice, its very hard to have the discipline to take the time to make every little change to my developer machine auto configure from scripts.)

Anyway, I reckon the high spec laptop is the dev machine of the future - there's basically performance parity with desktops at this stage.

Coltard

If you're configuring Min and Max Server memory on an instance of SQL Server where there are other instances of SQL Server on that server, you should adjust the Min and Max Server Memory on all instances, not just one.

MarkR

Would there be a particular brand you would favour? We may be doing some upgrades soon, and aren't tied into anyone right now.

Talisman

magooly wrote: »

Have looked into limiting the memory allocated to SQL Server but the guys in M$ have said SQL Server takes what it can get its hands on, regardless of what you limit it to. Their recommendation is to have a dedicated SQL Server machine.. as if that is practical in a dev env.

All team members have the same issue and have independently looked into solutions.. but alas we just shout moan and learn to live with it.

Have you considered virtualising SQL Server? If you put it in a VM with 4GB RAM, it will never consume more than 4GB.

Talisman

tobsey wrote: »

Thanks all for the tips, I actually have 2 instances of SQL Express running on my machine so I dropped them down to 256MB memory each. I rarely use them though because we have servers running SQL but I use them the odd time for playing. Dropping them down hasn't made much of a difference though.

I've seen the following machine from HP:

Intel Xeon Quad Core E3-1225v3 (8M Cache 3.2Ghz)
16GM RAM
1TB HD and 128 GB SSD
Intel HD Onboard Graphics P4600

That's 1400 give or take so just wondering if anyone has any comments before I submit a request.

€1400 seems quite cheap for a development workstation. How future proof is it? Can the RAM be upgraded to 32GB or is 16GB the limit? 16GB seems like plenty now, but it wasn't so long ago that 4GB was considered a lot of RAM.