jskrewson - 3:04 pm on Dec 22, 2010 (gmt 0)

The simplified answer is that I build a large Lucene search index for use by my website. I need a dev box that is also capable of building the same Lucene index so that I can test code changes without interrupting the production servers. I have to pre-process a little more than a terabyte of data prior to the Lucene build and I need a rebuild to finish in less than 24 hours, else code tweaks become very painful.

I use my dev box for a lot more than that, but the Lucene index is the primary reason for the power.