Strongly agreed. In fact, I found an over-dimensioned workstation to be one of the best tools improving performance of non-trivial programs. There's a lot of p

Strongly agreed. In fact, I found an over-dimensioned workstation to be one of the best tools improving performance of non-trivial programs. There's a lot of performance issues that don't stand out sufficiently on today's common-place enduser hardware, that will be very visible on a current two socket system. And fixing the issues benefits the lower end hardware of today. More often than not, the large issue one can see in large machines today, are issues seen on lower-end hardware in a few years. It's easy to see using too many cycles on enduser hardware. The effects of memory latency, various forms of cache contention, etc however, not so much. > Since any sane measurement is based on benchmarking and not eyeballing, slower CPUs don't help you I do find that somehow, to a non-rational degree, I have a considerably easier time getting a "feeling" for the performance bottlenecks when benchmarking on my workstation, than when benchmarking on a server. Which I guess kinda falls out of proper benchmarking.