I completely agree not allowing web developers to use the fastest machines to create the most bloated code, but I do hate suffering with absurdly underpowered machines in the office.
I like to be able to run a couple VMs at the same time without causing my system to grind to a halt. That being said, what I've done in the past is give myself (and my devs) fast machines loaded with RAM and such, but the environment they deploy onto is a low-grade commodity box.
The environment should be bare enough so that it causes developers and operations personnel to think twice before reading in a large file, or opening a tonne of file handles.
As a corollary, if you are deploying into a JVM environment (e.g.: Tomcat), DO NOT give the JVM a tonne of memory by default. Developers will write applications that just drink it up. Instead, start at the default (256MB) or sanely bump it up progressively as required by the application.
I like to be able to run a couple VMs at the same time without causing my system to grind to a halt. That being said, what I've done in the past is give myself (and my devs) fast machines loaded with RAM and such, but the environment they deploy onto is a low-grade commodity box.
The environment should be bare enough so that it causes developers and operations personnel to think twice before reading in a large file, or opening a tonne of file handles.
As a corollary, if you are deploying into a JVM environment (e.g.: Tomcat), DO NOT give the JVM a tonne of memory by default. Developers will write applications that just drink it up. Instead, start at the default (256MB) or sanely bump it up progressively as required by the application.