Comment by lostinpoetics

FWIW, i used a mid-2011 2.3Ghz i5 with 8 GB of RAM for about 4 years as a lightly used dev machine (read: basically ruby/rails, pg, and sublime text with some crud stripped out and running on OS X [not server]) that also hosted about 25-30 (low bandwidth) rails apps for internal use that did a lot of text processing and never really had too many complaints. flash forward 2 years of sitting idling without any activity and it's a bit sluggish now (granted that's because i've done literally nothing on the machine other than let it run)