It's happening again

[DimPrawn]

A slow machine to an hourly paid contractor is like slow setting concrete to a jobbing builder.

Relax, enjoy, invoice.

[doodab]

Two VMS with 6 cores? Each? Even if not, it's only a quad core processor (yes, I know it's hyperthreaded.)

My machine is a MUCH older spec than that, but I have no problems running a couple of decent VMs; this is a Windows 7 host, and 2 Linux VMs.

What are the host stats telling you? Where is it choking? Disk, memory paging, cpu..? If the host OS thinks it's fine and dandy, then what are the tools in the hosted OSs telling you?

You need to grab some data.

I have one with 4 cores & 8GB for a development server, and another with 2 cores and 4GB hosting just browsers & client tools that are connected to client co via a VPN. I could reduce the RAM allocated to this one to 2GB without causing too many problems.

Host memory usage is fairly steady around 14.5GB, I have vmware configured to fit VMs into host RAM so paging isn't an issue.

The main problem seems to be that browsers & other client tools respond badly to being run in the dev VM, to some extent that's because they are competing for CPU time with the server side stuff. This can be got around by running the browsers at least on the host machine. The second main problem is that the underlying software is actually very demanding on hardware, ideally the 8GB 4 core VM would be 3 separate machines with 2-4 cores and 4-8GB each and fast storage.

To be fair it performs more or less on a par with client co's actual deployment on much beefier hardware, it's just that the lag in response times is bloody annoying and it seems to get worse with each new version they release.

[doodab]

A slow machine to an hourly paid contractor is like slow setting concrete to a jobbing builder.

Relax, enjoy, invoice.

I need the dev machine to be as fast as possible because I don't know what I am doing (to be fair not many people do and I have a much better chance of figuring it out than most, which is why they gave me the job) and with every page taking 10-60s to load the odds of me figuring it out before someone gets upset are a bit too low for my liking. Given the contract value spending £2k on hardware that will make a difference is justifiable. £700 has gone on the basic machine, so I'm thinking £300 on another SSD and £300 to up the RAM to 32GB. I'm starting to think I should have gone for the 6 core CPU to start with

[doodab]

And now I have used the phrase "to be fair" in two posts in a row, which means I am a ******.

[Sysman]

640k is enough for anyone

He got "RAM" mixed up with "personal fortune".

[doodab]

Anyway, I think an hour or so spent tuning the config on my dev server will work wonders.

[vetran]

The main problem seems to be that browsers & other client tools respond badly to being run in the dev VM, to some extent that's because they are competing for CPU time with the server side stuff. This can be got around by running the browsers at least on the host machine.

Run the browsers & tools on a separate machine altogether? That has been my experience with sql server / sharepoint, let the server do its thing and optimise itself. If you use the host you will get contention. The tools will be expecting to run on cheaper machine and will be optimised (hopefully) for network operation.

[d000hg]

Windows is usable just not as the basis of virtual machines. I don't know why that is the case and couldn't be arsed to find out so adopted the contractor approach of spending money to solve the issue.

Lots of people use Windows-based VM systems without problems.