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Asked: 2026-05-12T07:10:21+00:00

I’m looking for suggestions on new development system from some programmers that have more

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I’m looking for suggestions on new development system from some programmers that have more experience, but let me give some background on why.

  • We need a new development server for
    running scripts on large feeds
  • Speed is not a concern, it just needs to
    finish
  • The scripts are not ran often,
    and are typically coded very quickly
    (not optimized) using Python or Perl

Current problem:

  • larger feeds need to be processed, and existing scripts need to be refactored to handle them because of memory errors
  • The system running the scripts is a Win32 machine with 4GB RAM, and a single process cannot will never be allowed more then 2GB of space

Instead of my team spending time refactoring a rarely used script, I want to be able to throw more memory at it. I know a 64 bit upgrade will help here, but I’m not sure what type of environment is ideal running scripts that need a lot of memory, so that is what I’m asking suggestions for.

I’ve been looking into Solaris servers, FreeBSD servers, just using 64-bit Windows… It’s hard to figure out what each system will be capable of once 64-bit versions of Python/Perl are installed and the scripts are actually running. If the system has 16GB of memory, when am I going to hit a memory error for a single process?

Some other things:

  • SSH to a remote server is an acceptable solution (probably ideal so we can have multiple users running scripts)
  • We have VMWare available, so that is another option if anyone has experience/comments about developing with a VMWare client

Any suggestions for a new system, or other things I should consider when deciding would be great.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I once faced a similar issue on 32bit Linux (with 4 to 8 gb of ram) albeit using a different scripting language (R). Considerable effort went into slicing and dicing data into appropriate chunks to not go belly-up. The effective limit of 3gb per process was a real constraint for the data sets I was analyzing.

    Now on 64bit Linux (with 12 to 16gb of ram), life is considerably easier. So slicing, no dicing. It just fits.

    So if your problem set is at that sweet spot, consider going to 64bit in whatever form suits you best. And as wazoox mentioned, installation of Debian or Ubuntu is a breeze, especially with the smaller / more focused ‘server’ flavors.

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