Re: Will RDi finally support 64 bit OS?

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen wrote:

Joe Pluta skrev den 26-02-2008 17:51:
What you think is silly may make perfect sense for others.

If perfect sense means poorly performing environments for programmers, then yes, I think it's silly. But I've fought that battle all my life - trying to explain to management why lack of programmer productivity is actually a cost.

Some coorporate environments - like mine - may enforce the usage of anti-virus programs, which is non-negotiable. This makes a severe impact on the disk system, and means that you basically want to have as much memory for disk caching as you possibly can.

I don't find this to be the case. I use anti-virus as well, and it has almost zero impact on my system. It's possible your anti-virus software is configured improperly, or you need better anti-virus software.

On top of that we are migrating to laptops, which have slower harddisks.

If your corporation is moving programmers to slower disk drives, then that is... silly.

I have a dual core Intel chip and 2 Gb of RAM and my WSDCi takes in the order of minutes to cold start. Fortunately warm starting is much faster.

I would submit that you have other problems. If it takes minutes to start WDSC you've got real issues. I'm not going to reboot to check my cold start time, but it's 15 seconds at most. My warm boot time is three seconds.

Our requirements are different. Production VM's should run on a production server but for testing and development nothing beats having everything with you. It also takes network issues out of the equation, which may be crucial when at other locations.

But you should never have more than one running, right? And aren't you just using the VM for testing? How much memory do your VMs use?

Anyway, this becomes a debate. I'm sure someone can come up with other reasons to require large amounts of memory, but using memory to make up for slow disk drives is a bad tradeoff. And in general, requiring more than 3GB on a workstation is a very exceptional case, in my opinion.

But then again, Bill Gates said we'd never need more than 640K. <smile>

Joe