How to speed up sharepoint development in Virtual PC?

Question

I am developing sharepoint (MOSS) project in Virtual PC. Unfortunately virtual PC can utilize only one core of my quad core machine. Are there any tips & tricks which can speed my development process?

Answer 1

Did you activate hardware virtualization extension in both your BIOS and VPC settings ?
Did you give your VM enough memory (I usually set around 2GB).

You may also switch to Win2008 + HyperV which is more powerful.

Answer 2

I run sharepoint on external harrdrive. VPC has 2.5 GB RAM allocated. It runs quite fast (not really lighting fast, but workable).

So my advice is to allocate as much memory to VPC as you can afford and run on external HDD. Use fire wire to connect you HDD if you can, it makes huge difference when compared to USB.

Other than that defragmentation of both your host machine and Virtual machine can help (but can take ages).

Answer 3

Things that we used to do before we moved to Hyper-V...

Don't allocate too much RAM to the VPC, it will start to use the paging file too much.

Make sure that the virtual hard drives and virtual memory files for the VPC are excluded from your antivirus program.

Defrag the VPC, then defrag the host.

Don't have your paging file on the same drive as your VPC.

Fix the size of the paging file so that it doesn't fragment.

Kill all background processes on your primary host that you don't have to have running for you to do your job... and for that matter tune Windows for best performance rather than best appearance.

Run Virtual Server rather than Virtual PC, and use Remote desktop to access the VPC (I've found VS to be a bit better at managing machines, and remote desktop seems to be faster and allows for a nice full screen experience on a second monitor).

Answer 4

Run something else. Virtual PC is garbage. Between HyperV, VMWare, and Virtualbox there are much better alternatives available.

Personally, I use VMWare Server. I tried HyperV but the performance wasn't up to what I was expecting from Microsoft. The fact that VMWare is available on 3 platforms means I can start my projects on a Macbook, transfer it to a Linux server, or open it on another windows box.

And I can choose 1,2 or 4 cores.

Answer 5

Check Scott Hanselman 's Virtual Machine Performance Checker. It is general article on how to improve performance of your virtual machine.

Answer 6

Use an SSD drive instead of HDD. There is a significant performance improvement, particularly in memory pressure situations where disk swapping is occurring.

Also check that the .NET Framework isn't checking the Certificate Revocation List. If there is a network connectivity issue then you will get timeouts.