[sldev] Is there a way to compile the SL viewer faster?

[Jesse Nesbitt]

Incredibuild is a pretty great tool, but it's neither free nor cheap.

On 3/13/07, Kelly Washington <kelly at lindenlab.com> wrote:
>
>  Viewer link times are the slowest part of building.  Internally we use
> distributed build tools for every platform - Xcode has it built in, linux
> has distcc and we use Incredibuild (not free) for windows.  That doesn't
> help link times though.  If you build on a mac ZeroLink will allow you to
> launch the viewer without linking - I personally don't use it but I hear
> others have had success with it.
>
> >From an internal email just the other day:
>
> > Details:
> > I decided to try to reduce my link times by throwing hardware at the
> > problem.
>
> > C: Western Digital 80 GB 7200 RPM 1.5 Gb SATA disk that came with my
> > box.  It has the operating system and compiler installed on it.
> > D: Western Digital 120 GB 7200 RPM 1.5 Gb SATA disk I added.
> > E: Western Digital 36 GB 10,000 RPM 1.5 Gb SATA disk I added.
>
> > Time to link newview_noopt.exe:
> > C: 2'15"
> > D: 2'00"
> > E: 1'30"
>
> In short, moving to a second disk from the main OS reduced link time by
> ~12%, moving to a faster drive reduced it about another  21% (~33% better
> than when on the primary OS disk.
>
> On the software side cleaning up headers has been proven to reduce link
> times.  For example, replacing unnecessary #includes in headers with
> declarations (class LLFoo;).  Some of the headers are from cruft and are no
> longer needed.  Cleaning these up does reduce link times.
>
> Moving linden libraries to dynamic libs would also greatly reduce link
> times - but this is probably not trivial to implement.
>
> If anyone else has tips for reducing compile or link times please do
> share.
>
> Dale - I would be very interested in any speed tests you could do with the
> raid setup and / or the ram disk once you get it working.  :)
>
>  - Kelly
>
> Dale Glass wrote:
>
> В сообщении от 13 марта 2007 21:46 Tobias Lang написал(a):
>
>
>   Hello,
>
> I would be interested how you folks are dealing with the very long
> compilation time of the SL viewer. I understand that the initial
> compilation takes 30 min, but the linking process always takes
> minutes on my P4. How are you guys developing like this? Better
> machines, very careful programming? Or is there a magic switch?
>
> Thanks,
> Tobias
>
>
>  Out of curiosity, I did a quick test.
>
> Compilation seems fairly disk intensive, especially linking. Linking
> takes 1 minute here.
>
> So, you could speed it up by using a RAID (I have a RAID-1), or by
> building on a RAM disk (which I plan to try as soon as I upgrade my
> memory).
>
> On Linux, the compilation process seems to create the object files
> in /tmp. A quick check indicates that there are 330MB of files are
> created during compilation, so moving that to a ramdisk is possible.
> But you'd probably need to sync that to disk, as otherwise after
> rebooting the computer it'd require a full rebuild.
>
>
> For me, this is fairly satisfactory, I generally don't compile that
> much in a day. Linking doesn't fail very often, as mistakes that
> cause it to fail are rare, and compilation errors are faster to
> correct.
>
>
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-- 
--Jesse
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