2011/8/1 Jasper van de Gronde <th.v.d.gronde@...528...>:
Currently I'm only working on a notebook (three years old, and lets just say I bought it for the daylight readable screen and light weight, not its performance) and frankly this is starting to be a nuisance. Usually a complete build takes about six hours or so, but recently it took as much as ten hours... (Probably because part of the time I was also doing something on the side, but still.) As a stop gap measure I've now started using ccache, but obviously that doesn't help much when doing normal builds.
Ten hours is ridiculously long even when using btool. I get far lower times (1.5h max) in virtualized Windows XP. I think the build process might be RAM starved. You need at least 1.2GB of free RAM to keep all files in the page cache.
So I'm beginning to consider buying a new machine and am wondering what sort of improvement I can expect from what kind of machine (using a complete clean build as a kind of benchmark).
Go for a multicore machine with at least 4GB of RAM. I have Intel Core i7-920, from the low end of the i7 family, 6GB RAM and a standard HDD, and a clean build with make -j8 takes only a few minutes. Most of the time on small rebuilds (e.g. a few files changed) is actually spent processing the Autotools cruft in makefiles, and linking is a close second.
Regards, Krzysztof