Why are our Visual Studio builds so slow, but only on one machine?

Question

We recently bought two new build machines that have the same specs/hardware. From what I understand, the same or very similar disk images were used to load onto that machine. But, I believe Visual Studio 2008 was installed later on both. We have started a build of the same source code on both machines, but one of the machines always finishes in about 40% of the time of the other. We've monitored the machines to make sure one doesn't have any other processes hogging time, but there weren't any.

Do you have any ideas as to the difference on performance? Could there be a certain Visual Studio setting that would cause extra overhead? Or is it most like a system setting?

Answer 1

There's not a lot of information here, but I'd guess

1. Hardware problem: if one machine has a faulty CPU, HDD, or fan it might be running slower due to errors.
2. Network problem: if any part of your build goes out to the network, there might be a lengthy delay if something can't be seen, or if the link is bad from the slower machine.
3. Is there any chance that during the build machine 1 talks to itself over network, but machine 2 talks to machine 1 instead of itself?