Environment Variables - Dev/Test/Production?

Woody asks: "It's common knowledge that the development environment should be the same as the test environment which should mimic the production environment whenever possible. I'm currently working on a project where we develop on Dell, test on IBM, and the production system is up in the air. For embedded systems the differences can be running on a VM versus running on the actual hardware. What I want to know is what kind of problems have Slashdot readers been faced with because of different environments being used for different phase of their projects, and how have they been overcome?"

Comments

Re:Depends on the discipline of the developers

[Godeke]

So, which "performance" are we optimizing for? Memory footprint? Disk access? CPU utilization? Network utilization?

It turns out you rarely know which will bite your face off until you get a representative data set running. If you made the wrong choice, you probably made things *worse* than if you had opted for working code that could be re-factored from "easy to read" to "mostly easy to read and performs where it counts".

When you are working on server based solutions that will be hit hard, all of those could be your bottleneck: or none.