Quick Drupal Development and Prototyping

How do you do quick Drupal development testing and prototyping?

I'm a Windows power user, but I work with a lot of Linux servers.  One of my favorite ways to do quick Drupal development, testing and prototyping is to use the Bitnami Drupal stack: an Ubuntu virtual machine image that I can spawn multiple copies of and is easy and ready to go.  Drupal is already installed along with Views and a few other common modules.  Drush is also included as part of the image now.

Drupal and other required software is typically installed in the /opt/bitnami/ directories.

Check it out and I hope that some of you find it useful.  Please feel free to share your own methods in comments.

Drupal Memory Performance

Drupal has been known to be quite resource intensive, but I'm happy to hear about the improvements that are being made for Drupal 8. I just wanted to share this interesting post I found on Drupal and the PHP Memory Limit:

Why does Drupal need so much memory? Among other things, because it has a cache problem (which of course saves your database) Drupal currently likes to cache ALL views in one place, ALL fields in one place, etc. So once you get a site with many content types, fields, views, the caches become huge, and they are all loaded into your memory with each request.... [read more]