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Which PC components make the biggest impact on your compile times for Visual Studio?

Which PC components make the biggest impact on your compile times for Visual Studio?

Which PC specifications have the biggest impact on your compile times? Disk? Clock speed? Number of CPU cores?

Asked by: Guest | Views: 303
Total answers/comments: 4
Guest [Entry]

"Scott Gu also posted about what affects building speed, pointing mainly to I/O resources such as the hard disk.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx"
Guest [Entry]

"Here's some nice research from Scott Hanselman on using multiple CPUs for MSBUild. The speed-ups are pretty dramatic.

Edit: I should note however, that in order to have a good experience using Visual Studio, you need plenty of RAM. :)"
Guest [Entry]

"For building C++ programs, the #1 factor before all else is structural - if the source code is heavily vertically structured, it will have a devastating impact on build times, especially incremental builds. I locally restructured a few portions of a project for a dramatic improvement on a quad-core Xeon. 18 months later and they (the people who own the project) still can't match my wall-clock build times even on Core i7 machines.

The effect (positive or negative) of your software layout multiplies across every member of your team and every build they perform."
Guest [Entry]

Xoreax IncrediBuild is a distributed build system that has made a huge improvement on compile times where I work. (Unfortunately, link times are still pretty long, particularly release builds using whole-program optimization and link-time code generation, but that's to be expected.)