Just completed a fresh install of SS 2.2.3 on WAMP with Windows XP. Using Firefox 3.0.4. The computer is not very fast - 512mb RAM etc.

Given these conditions I would expect the admin panel of SS to be faster than it is. It takes around 12 seconds to switch between tabs (e.g. Site Content & Files and Images). While this as a number doesn't seem long, as we're all accustomed to broadband-enabled page loads of a few seconds this is a significant factor.

The strange thing is that the demo.silverstripe.com panel loads and functions in terms of changing tabs in about half the time as the panel running locally on my machine.

Is this normal behaviour? Does the server running SS really have to be quite highly spec'ed and preferably a *nix environ?

On a related note, in contrast to other posts on this forum, I have no significant speed problems with the text editor. That part is fine.

I have also played with installing XCache as a PHP module. It installs fine but I didn't really notice any difference. I don't fully understand how xcache works as well though in this scenario.

Is there anything else I can do to my local machine config? Maybe apache httpd.conf changes?
Or would I be better off just running the dev environment from a faster remote Linux box on dreamhost or something?