I have a C++ code which I am compiling using VC7 and it is taking a lot of time to build it. Is there any way I could profile it and find why it is taking time to build ?
+5
A:
In Visual Studio 2008, there's a setting for turning on build timing. It might be there in VC7 as well...
Tools / Options / Projects and Solutions / VC++ Project Settings / Build Timing: Yes
This applies to C++ projects, which (as of VS2008) don't use MSBuild. For MSBuild-based projects (such as C#), you want to increase the verbosity:
Tools / Options / Projects and Solutions / Build and Run / MSBuild project build output verbosity
By default, it's set to "Minimal".
Roger Lipscombe
2009-02-17 10:25:03
+2
A:
Is the source code on a network? This sometimes slows the compilation a lot.
Gamecat
2009-02-17 10:25:55
Yes and it is under the clearcase source control.
Naveen
2009-02-17 10:27:41
Use a local snapshot view to build.
Pete Kirkham
2009-02-17 10:29:30
Never ever use a dynamic view for source code. it's way more trouble than its worth.
shoosh
2009-02-17 10:32:18
s/Sometimes/Always/
JesperE
2009-02-17 10:44:26
A:
My guess is that it would be difficult to get useful results from profiling. You could look at the create times of each .obj file and check if there are any files that are particularly slow, but I doubt this would be the case.
Have you gone through the compiler options such as pre-compiled headers to see what improvements ths provides? Similarly, turning off the optimizer where it is not required can speed the build up significantly. My advice would be to take some time to try out a few 'what if' scenarios.
Shane MacLaughlin
2009-02-17 10:38:45
+3
A:
If the code is template-intensive, then you could try doing the template instantiation profiling. Steven Watanabe came up with the profiler and if I remember correctly it was supposed to work with VS (don't know the version).
Anonymous
2009-02-17 10:47:16
+1, templates can hit comilation time badly, even with precompiled headers
Shane MacLaughlin
2009-02-17 11:20:02
A:
You can try if possible in your situation the trick of #include all .cpp files into a single compilation unit, just for the purpose of checking if you have much overhead from many files and many includes.
Zitrax
2009-02-17 22:03:58
A:
If your code makes extensive use of template, you might be interested in Templight, a tool developed by a hungarian research team for debugging and profiling C++ template metaprograms (paper). It seems very promising, but I'm not sure the tool is available for download...
Luc Touraille
2009-10-22 14:16:09