What am I most excited for? Never having to run vagrant up --provision again. Spinning up a new build everyday can be time consuming! Simply, I was starting to feel like VVV was just getting in the way of being productive. I got things to do!

Those are My RAMS (Performance)

VVV will take up about 1GB of memory working or not (and don’t try and lower it). This isn’t really VVV’s fault, mainly my own. I bought a new Macbook Air and started with the lower-end hardware. Though things ran faster (because of the SSD), I had less RAM’s and less HD space now. On my Macbook Pro (may it rest in peace) I never had to worry about RAM, but as soon as I started hitting projects all day it became apparent I needed all the resources I could get out of my machine.

I’m probably not even using VVV all-the-way!

Ultimately, this is what it really comes down to. I just haven’t felt like it was that much better than a MAMP or XAMPP solution. Ever since I fired it up I haven’t really found anything great about it far from other solutions (except that it’s Linux), but that’s probably my fault anyways. I just don’t use a lot of the powerhouse things Vagrant probably does and I feel like I’m sacrificing a lot.

XAMPP

When I first broke up with MAMP for VVV, it seemed like a good fit (and it was the hip thing everyone was doing). I thought the right thing to do was run my dev environment in a box that worked most like the Internet does, on Linux. But, after using it for about a year, and throwing that --provision switch a few hundred times, I’m trying out XAMPP, which just runs Apache, PHP, MySQL. That’s all I really need to do what I do and sudo xampp restart gets it done in under 10 seconds!

We broke up, but we’re still friends

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try out VVV! People swear by it, and there’s a reason, I’m just not sure if I’m aware of it yet… It was also built by very smart people that work on very smart projects. And, It’s still on my machine! Anytime I need to test a site outside of the typical Apache box (with NGINX becoming more and more popular), it’ll be there for me.

VVV probably does a lot of great things, but you better have a slow coffee machine–provisioning is a bitch!