Read over Magento's Optimization White Paper, although it mentions enterprise the same methodologies will and should be applied. Magento is by no means simplistic and can be very resource intensive. Like some others mentioned I normally run within a Virtual Machine on a LAMP stack and have all my optimization's (both at server application levels and on a Magento level) preset on a base install of Magento. Running an Opcode cache like eAccelerator or APC can help improve load times. Keeping Magento's caching layers enabled can help as well but can cripple development if you forget its enabled during development, however there are lots of tools available that can clear this for you from a single command line or a tool like Alan Storms eCommerce Bug.
EDIT
Optimization Whitepaper link:
Also, with PHP7 now including OpCache, enabling it with default settings with date/time checks along with AOE_ClassPathCache can help disk I/O Performance.
If you are using an IDE with Class lookups, keeping a local copy of the code base you are working on can greatly speed up indexing in such IDEs like PHPStorm/NetBeans/etc. Atwix has a good article on Docker with Magento:
Some good tools for local Magento 1.x development:
As I am working in a corporate environment where developers faces firewall issues, none of the other answers resolved my issue.
As the port is not used by Skype, but by some other internal applications,
I followed the below steps to resolve the issue:
Step 1 - From the XAMPP Control Panel, under Apache, click the Config button, and select the Apache (httpd.conf).
Inside the httpd.conf file, somehow I found a line that says:
Listen 80
And change the 80 into any number / port you want. In my scenario I’m using port 8080.
Listen 8080
Still from the httpd.conf file, I found another line that says:
ServerName localhost:80
Change 80 to 8080.
ServerName localhost:8080
Step 2 - From the XAMPP Control Panel, under Apache, click the Config button again, but this time select the Apache (httpd-ssl.conf). Inside the httpd-ssl.conf file, find line that says
Listen 443
And change the 443 into any number / port you want. I’ll using 4433 as the new port number.
Listen 4433
Still from the httpd-ssl.conf file, find another line that says
<VirtualHost _default_:443>
ServerName localhost:443
And change 443 to 4433.
<VirtualHost _default_:4433>
ServerName localhost:4433
Remember to save the httpd.conf and httpd-ssl.conf files after performing some changes. Then restart the Apache service.
Best Answer
I encounted the same problem. After replacing all paths in httpd.conf, httpd-ssl.conf, httpd-xampp.conf with full paths like:
ServerRoot "d:/program_files/xampp/apache"apache started.