Hello,
Apparently the speed of the C++ linker in Visual Studio 2010 hasn't improved that much (about 25% in our case). This means that we're still stuck with linking times between 30 seconds and two minutes. Surely there are linkers out there that perform better? Does anyone have experience with switching to another linker or even a complete tool set and seeing linking times go down drastically?
Cheers,
Sebastiaan
There may be, but I imagine you'd be talking improvements in the range of a few percentage points. You're unlikely to find anything that's magnitudes faster (which is, I assume, what you'd like).
There are ways to improve your link times, though. What options do you have turned on? Things like "Enable Incremental Linking" and "Enable Function-level Linking" can have dramatic effects on linking performance (well, obviously the first time you link it'll be a "full" link, but subsequent links can be made much quicker with these settings).
You may well find a faster linker but, unless it's ten times as fast and I'm linking thirty times an hour, I think I'd prefer to use the tools that Microsoft has tested with.
I would rather have relatively slow link times than potentially unstable software.
And you kids are spoilt nowadays. In my day, we had to submit our 80-column cards to the computer centre and, if we were lucky, the operator would get it typed in by next Thursday and we could start debugging from the hardcopy output :-)
When we checked the linker speed, we have identified the disk speed to be the most limiting factor. The amount of file traffic is huge, especially because of debugging info (just check the size of the pdb).
For us the solution was:
We have also experimented with SSD, but the SSD we have tried had very slow write performance, therefore the net effect was negative. This might have changed meanwhile, especially with the best of SSDs.
As a first step I would suggest to launch Process Explorer (or even Task Manager will do) and check your CPU load and I/O traffic during the link phase, so that you can verify of you are CPU limited, or I/O limited.
Check out "Unity" builds. This improves link times dramatically:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/847974/c-the-benefits-disadvantages-of-unity-builds
Wow and i get nervous when my link time is above 10 sec.
Use modern style SSD Disks. I have 2x 60 GB OCZ Vertex2 E Disks as a RAID 0 and IO is not a problem anymore. SSD are now good enough for daily use even for heavy writes.
And get a few gigabyte of memory. Can't see any reason anymore to work with less then 8 GB RAM.