What is the best way to improve ASP.NET/C# compilation speed?

Question

UPDATE: Focus your answers on hardware solutions please.

What hardware/tools/add-in are you using to improve ASP.NET compilation and first execution speed? We are looking at solid state hard drives to speed things up, but the prices are really high right now.

I have two 7200rpm harddrives in RAID 0 right now and I'm not satisfied with the performance anymore.

So my main question is what is the best cost effective way right now to improve ASP.NET compilation speed and overall development performance when you do a lot of debugging?

Scott Gu has a pretty good blog post about this, anyone has anything else to suggest?

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

Answer 1

You can precompile the site, which will make the first run experience better

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227972.aspx

Answer 2

One of the important things to do is keeping projects of not-so-often changed assemblies unloaded. When a change occurs, load it, compile and unload again. It makes huge differences in large solutions.

Answer 3

I switched from websites to web appications. Compile time went down by a factor of ten at least. Also, I try not to use the debugger if possible ("Run without debugging"). This cuts down by a lot the time it takes to start the web application.

Answer 4

I would recommend adding as much memory to your PC as you can. If your solutions are super large you may want to explore 64bit so that your machine can address more than 3GB of ram.

Also Visual Studio 2008 SP1 seems to be markedly faster than previous versions, make certain you are running the latest release with the Service Packs.

Good Luck!

Answer 5

First make sure your that you are using Web Application Projects (WAP). In our experience, compared to Website Projects, WAP compiles roughly 10x faster.

Then, consider migrating all the logic (including complex UI components) into separate library projects. The C# compiler way faster than the ASP.NET compiler (at least for VS2005).

Answer 6

If you are looking purely at hardware you will need to search for benchmarks around the web. There are a few articles written just on the performance of hardware on Visual Studio compilation, I am just too lazy to find them and link them.

Hardware solutions can be endless because you can get some really high end quipment if you have the money. Otherwise its the usual more memory, faster processor, and faster hard drive. Moving to a 64bit OS also helps.

If you want to be even more specific? Just off the top of my head...8GB or more of memory, if you cant afford solid state drives I'd go for 10K to 15K RPM hard drives. There is a debate of whether quad-core makes any difference but look up the benchmarks and see what works for you.

Answer 7

If you are looking at just hardware, Multi-core processors, high amounts of ram, and ideally 10K or 15K hard drives.

I personally have noticed a huge improvement in performance with the change to 10K RPM drives.

Answer 8

If you have lots of 3rd party "Referenced Assemblies" ensuring that CopyLocal=False on all projects except for the web application project makes quite a big difference.

I blogged about the perf increases I managed to get by making this simple change:

Speeding Up your Desktop Build - Part 1

Answer 9

The best way to improve ASP.NET compile time is to throw more hardware at it. An OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD drive and an Intel i7 960 gave me a huge boost. You can see my results here.