Slow compilation of boost-based unit test suite

Question

Hi all,

I use boost.test library to write unit tests for my application.

The problem is, when one particular *.cpp file containing test suite grows up to certain size, compilation of that file becomes extremely slow.

I use BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE macro to define test cases.

Boost version is 1.34.1

Build env is autotools + gcc 4.3 under Fedora 9.

I will highly appreciate if somebody will point out possible reasons of such behaviour.

Answer 1

You might run out physical memory and the system starts using the swap (file/partition) a lot more intensively than normaly (thrashing).

Answer 2

One way to try to find out what is going on is to use gcc option -Q and see where is the difference between normal and extremely slow case.