Buying a machine for continuous integration - key factors?

Question

I'm planning to propose to my (very small) company that we buy a computer to run continous integration on. If they say yes, the task of actually buying the machine will probably fall on me, so my question is:

What do I look for in a computer that will be used for continuous integration for a very small (3 people) php team?

What "stuff" (memory, processor, etc.) are important, and what are not?

Answer 1

You're not really going to need that powerful of a machine. If you are running tests or other metrics, processing ability is probably your primary concern but really you could run that on an old pentium 1 and it would probably work.

Your constraints are going to be your operating environment. If you are running LAMP you want to use a machine that can handle LAMP setup well which is pretty much any *nix machine that is fairly modern.

I set up a continuous integration setup for .NET on an old Pentium4 workstation we had laying around and it handled just fine.

One thing to keep in mind is storage space if you are archiving your code in the build.