I usually use virtual machines for development if I am on Windows. On this machine I have several VM's with different flavours of Linux for that purpose. However, I also have a WAMP installation which I use if I want to muck with a test Drupal site or just try out some stuff.
As a lot of people out there know, WAMP and XAMPP can really suck at performance. I remember in the past waiting 40 seconds for a page load on a Drupal site which was pretty clean, which of course is enough to make you want to rip your own hair out. After firing WAMP up today for the first time in months, I thought I'd have a hunt around to see if there were any solutions to this problem. Here are two things I found that made quite a difference on my system.
1. Adjust the realpath_cache_size in php.ini, and set it to a reasonable level. I set mine to 24 meg which is probably a bit too high, some people are saying that even 2 meg gives them improvements. In WAMP you can edit the php.ini file by clicking on the WAMP icon in your toolbar, scrolling up to the PHP section, and clicking on php.ini. Find the line that starts with ;realpath_cache_size, and uncomment it out, so it should now read:
realpath_cache_size=24M
2. Disable the IPv6 line in your Windows hosts file (note this will only work on Vista and 7, not XP). You will need to do this as adminstrator, so you may need to right click on the hosts file and choose 'open as administrator'. The file is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
Change the line:
::1 localhost
to
#::1 localhost
and save the file. Basically all you are doing is commenting the line out with a hash (#) so it's not used.
See if that makes any difference. I noticed it made an improvement to my overall system, not just WAMP. If you see no difference, then you can always re-edit the hosts file and remove the hash to enable the line again.
