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Computer specs for compilation times? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My computer is slow at compiling, esp. LLVM. If I were to buy a new computer, what components would I focus on to improve this?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Compilation is CPU bound and, depending on what language mostly single core per compilation unit (I.e. in LLVM that's roughly per file, but incremental compilations will probably only touch a file or two at a time, so the highest benefit will be from higher single core clock speed, not higher core count). So you want to focus on higher clock speed CPUs.

Also, high speed disks (NVME or at least a regular SSD) gives you performance gains for larger codebases.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

On linux you can also use vmtouch to force cache the project files in RAM. This would speed up the first compilation of the day. On repeated compilations files that are read from disk would naturally be in the RAM cache already and it would not matter what drive you have.

I have used this in the past when I had slow drives. I was forcing all necessary system libs (my IDE, jdk etc.) and my project files into RAM at the start of the day, before going on a 2min break to make coffee while it read all that stuff from a hdd. Which sped up the workflow in general, at least at the start of the day.

It is not the same as a ramdisk, as the normal linux file cache writes back changes to the disk in the background.

You can also pin your fastest core to a specific process, so that it gets no tasks except for the one you want it to do. But that seems more hassle than it's worth, so I never tried that.