The first key of success with SharePoint 2010 is the hardware architecture. Nobody likes slow websites, thus slow Intranet website. And from an operation point-of-view, debugging bad performance is the most complex (and probably annoying) things to do. So making sure SharePoint 2010 is hosted on the appropriate hardware architecture will give you confidence on your system.
Building an architecture must first begin by reviewing what are the best practices recommended by the software manufacturer.
Microsoft TechNet articles
Hardware requirements – Web servers, application servers, and single server installations
Hardware requirements – Database servers
Note about development farm
Most of the time, we think the development farm like a small machine used only by few people. So it’s not a big deal if the machine isn’t performant. What a bad assumption! A developer will work all day on this machine. And SharePoint development is usually based on solutions development and deployment. Problem is, in order to the developer to test his code, he will have to deploy his solution over and over again on the development farm. That will happen 10 to 20 times at day at least. And each time, the Web Server Application pool will have to be recycled. So, if the development server take 2 to 3 minutes to reload the App Pool, the developer will lost at least 30 minutes to an hour waiting the SharePoint Site to reload. So think the development server like a production server. My suggestion is: Put more RAM and more CPUs, but limit the size of the disks.
