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recommended spec for Visual Studio development

My development laptop has the following spec :
system specification
It runs windows 10 and I use it for email, office and VS development on a number of large synergy.net projects (1000+ sources) using synergy 10.3.3e and the latest VS.

Does that seem reasonable ?

The biggest bottleneck I seem have is the disk (1TB) running at 100%.  memory and processor rarely get above 50%

I don't want a desktop as I need to take my dev laptop on site with me.

How does that rate against what everyone else uses ?
 

9 Answers
0   | Posted by Gordon Ireland to Other on 8/1/2018, 6:27 PM
Bill Hawkins
I've been using a laptop for Visual Studio development for a while, and I found that maximizing the installed memory is key to getting good performance.  I would recommend that you double your memory to 16GB.  As disk I/O is a bottleneck (and disk I/O will go down if you up the memory) you could try using a SSD instead of a traditional hard drive.

My system is 
User-added image
and I have two SSD's; a 250GB system drive and a 500GB "work" drive.

8/2/2018, 9:46 PM   0  
Doug Hirth
Steve Ives briefly talked for 2 minutes about what he suggests for development system specs during the 2017 DevPartner Conference. If you are interested, you can find the video on YouTube.

8/2/2018, 11:36 PM   0  
Gordon Ireland
Thanks for this.

I had been hoping to get a "do everything" laptop, however i now think a desktop as described (available on Amazon around £400 to £500) is the way to go for office based development, with my current laptop for onsite work.

Githib for common source control, Office 365 for office apps, and Onedrive for shared document storage

SSD for sources and projects

3TB disk for data files

I noticed that a number of PCs with this spec were described as gaming PCs.  Does gaming and VS development have similar needs ?  Or do I need to look more closely?
 

8/3/2018, 7:56 AM   0  
Kish Baley
I have two main development laptops. One runs an I5-6200U chip (2core/4logical) at 2.4GHz w/8GB RAM, this one struggles a bit when I have more than two VS solutions open. The other runs an I7-4700MQ chip (4core/8logical) at 2.4GHz w/16GB RAM, I've had as many as 4 open VS solutions, SSMS, Postman and multiple RDP connections open and I've never had a slowdown that I could tell. So more RAM is the key IMO. FYI,  I actually prefer multiple mid-priced laptops to a single high-end, specially since I tend to separate laptops by active projects. I have a 3rd laptop that I use for emails, Office and when I RDP into customer systems.

Gaming machines have everything you need for VS development. Where they differ is that they typically have high-end graphics cards, which you probably won't need for VS development. You could save $100+ by not having high-end graphics.

When I can, I've replaced the hard drives on my laptops with SSDs. Pricing for laptops with SSD already on it tends to be $150 - $200 more than if you installed it yourself (very easy by the way). Local disk space isn't an issue for me, my largest SSD is 512GB and it still has 40% available even with about 40 different projects on it. I offload completed projects and backup my current stuff on two network RAID 1 drives (2TB and 4TB each) which I highly recommend once you start having multiple PCs. FYI, I don't notice a significant performance boost with SSDs over HD, the reason I prefer it is it consumes less power AND it'll take more abuse than a HD, which is ideal for laptops.
 

8/3/2018, 1:47 PM   0  
Ace Olszowka
I echo everything said here, more is always better.

Our standard developer machine here at CU Is:
  • Core i7 Latest Gen (I'm on a i7-4790, which is one of the older machines)
  • 32GB of RAM (64GB is starting to become the standard on the newer machines)
  • 512GB SATAIII SSD (Samsung 850 PRO)
The Build Servers (which do not use Visual Studio but only MSBuild) generally run with (in a Hyper-V instance):
  • 8 Virtual Cores (Xeon E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz as the host)
  • 16GB of RAM
  • 200GB SSD (I want to say its a PCIe SSD but I don't recall what our blades are)
Our solutions are pretty large, you at MINIMUM have to open 24 SYNPROJ files in any Synergy Solution (due to the design and dependencies) on average you're opening around 30-35 SYNPROJ files in a single solution (the upper bound is ~2000 however that is only ever accessed by the Build when it builds everything).

When building in a build server each additional core means you need at minimum 2GB of RAM per core (this is due to the overhead and what I think its a memory leak that I haven't been able to track down with Marty and the crew yet).

Absolute minimum I'd run with (I have on my VM) is:
  • 4 Virtual cores (on my i7-4790)
  • 4GB RAM
  • 100GB SSD
Even at that setup I am unable to build the entire solution once we turned on level 4 warnings due to memory exhaustion (hence why the build servers have 16GB RAM) but I am able to open most solutions.

Priority is: RAM > Disk (SSD PCIe/NVMe) >  Disk (SSD SATAIII) > Additional CPU Cores

If you're willing to always be connected to the Internet what about full cloud development? Host a massive machine up in Azure and simply RDP into it?

8/6/2018, 3:16 PM   0  
Steve Ives
These days you need to be looking for AT LEAST a quad core CPU, with 8GB of RAM as a MINIMUM (more is MUCH better). And the biggest thing you can do is not use "spinning" hard drives. SSD's are so cheap and so fast, there really is no excuse not to use them exclusively. And on newer systems, make sure you're using NVME SSD's.

OK, let's get brutally honest here. If your job is software development then you NEED a decent computer. Yes, there are lots of cheap laptops out there, but the old adage is true, "you get what you pay for"!

If you want a laptop that will perform well for software development with current tools, and for a few year into the future, you need to be looking at main brand systems (Lenovo, Dell, HP) and you need to be spending $2000 to $3000.

Steve

8/17/2018, 6:26 AM   1  
Gordon Ireland
I gave the recommended spec to an it infrastructure company I work with. They are sorting me out with a refurbished hp desktop, xenon quad core processor, 32gb ram, ssd and an extra 1tb hard drive.

£650 +vat

8/17/2018, 8:05 AM   1  
Steve Ives
Oh sure, desktops are way cheaper than high end laptops. Nice!

8/17/2018, 4:38 PM   0  
Gordon Ireland
I have to say this is the best thing I have done.   VS now loads in 3 seconds compared to 30, my large synergy.net solution loads in 30 seconds instead of 90, and I can build the whole thing in 1.5 minutes, instead of 6.5.

Plus everything else is faster too

Its amazing what you put up with.  

8/29/2018, 10:50 AM   0  
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