For those of you that have setup a testing server at home, did you think it's better to get a separate PC and dedicate it as a test server or is it just as easy to run a test server on the same PC with everything else.
I currently use a WindowsXP machine and wonder if I'm asking for trouble trying to put Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc. on there.
This chug-a-lup laptop (HP ze4220, 1.6gh, 128MB RAM) I'm on handles XAMPP great.
Here's its memory usages for XAMPP:
Apache: 1,124k
FileZillaServer: 624k
mysqld-nt: 704k
(Mercury mail turned off.)
I haven't had a chance to see what % of CPU they take but I've never experienced lag in testing my sites.
The latest version of XAMPP automatically starts up on startup, but you can turn it off as need be. It also allows switching between php 4 and 5 (are they really that different?)
I've also got it on a 1gh, 386MB RAM PIII and a 2.8gh 256MB Pentium D.
(I've been considering setting up one of the desktops to dual boot so that I can have linux to test my sites on those browsers, any thoughts?)
