The Tragedy

Recently I was looking into doing more dev on a Windows machine — you know, because basically all our users on are on Windows — and ran into the sad, sad fact that a clean build is going to take me 40 minutes on a brand new “pro-level” laptop. That’s just unacceptable. I filed a bug for that, the response was roughly “yeah we know, get a better machine” and was closed as invalid. I guess I get it, as far as a short term solution that makes sense, but this is pretty sad. It’s sad because on my 3 year old MacBook Pro I get 22 minute clean build for OSX. On my Linux desktop with similar specs I’m seeing 18 minute builds (this is without ccache).

System specs:

– Win10 laptop, Intel Xeon E3-1505 M @ 2.80GHz, 32 GB RAM, SSD

– OSX 10.12.1 laptop, Intel Core i7-4960HQ @ 2.6G0Hz, 16 GB RAM, SSD

– Ubuntu 16.04 desktop, Intel Core i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 32 GB RAM, SSD

I should note we’re talking about clobber builds here for a platform dev poking around in C++. A lot of work has been done to make builds for frontend folks super fast with artifact builds (we’re talking a minute or two). We could also look at iterative builds, but often I’m working in heavily shared files that it doesn’t really matter (strings etc).

Not all is lost

It sounds like there’s some work to make it better although I don’t have any bug numbers, and have no clue what the priority is. It was also pointed out that sccache is going to work locally on Windows which should be a big improvement, it will be interesting to see some actual numbers.

I’m not sure if there’s more I can do to improve things as-is, here’s what I’ve done so far:

– Disabled malware scanning for my dev directory

– Configured the laptop to “performance” mode

Just piping the build output to /dev/null was actually rather effective, it shaved about 5 minutes from the build time. This isn’t a great solution though as I’d like to see progress and warnings. Another suggestion was to disable parts of Firefox that I don’t need, unfortunately I often tinker with files that are used throughout the codebase so I can’t disable things without worrying about breaking them.

Any other suggestions out there? Links to bugs?