Development System Memory

F

Fred Nelson

Hi:

I know that this is a hardware question however it involves VS 2005
which I use to develop web apps in C#.

My machine is Windows XP with 512mb of RAM. I recently upgraded it from
256mb and the performance is fantastic!

My question is if I upgraded it again (say to 1GB) would I have another
significant performance increase? (I could take it as high as 4GB).

If anyone has a recommendation I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Fred
 
K

Karl Seguin

You'll hit a diminishing return as you keep upgrading. I've found my sweet
spot to be 1gb, but that has more to do with gaming than development.

The overall answer is that it depends. Memory might not be your bottleneck
anymore. Say you were running on a P100 (exageration). You could upgrade
to 10000Gb and your CPU would still be limiting the overall performance of
your system. An old hard drive could also be an issue.

Frankly, if you find developing w/512 is reasonable (ie, you don't find
yourself thinking how slow it is all the time) I say stick with it. Ram is
so cheap though, it's no big deal. I know I find VS.Net 2005 still pretty
slow despite the claims of how 80% faster it was going to be...

Karl
 
S

S. Justin Gengo

Fred,

I run a lot of applications at the same time and I have both a desktop and a
laptop that each have 1gig of memory. You will always have increased
performance with more memory, but seeing that performance increase will
mostly depend on how many applications you run at the same time.

The more memory you have the less data needs to be stored on the hard drive
in the page file. But if you aren't using all your memory now because you
only keep one or two applications running at a time then I doubt you'd see
much more performance gain. However if, like me, you are running a
development environment where your machine is running VS2005, SQL Server,
and IIS, there are quite a few applications running already and then most of
us run Outlook, Word, A graphic editor like fireworks and/or photoshop, plus
any number of other programs at the same time. If that's the case with you
getting to 1gig would probably give you even better performance.

--
Sincerely,

S. Justin Gengo, MCP
Web Developer / Programmer

www.aboutfortunate.com

"Out of chaos comes order."
Nietzsche
 

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