VS2010 build times Win XP vs. Win 7

Hello, I am trying to determine which OS is the best one for VC++ VS2010. I know that Microsoft recommends Win7 x64 however I did some testing and the results are quite confusing:

Build times (single threaded compilation on q9650 CPU) of reference VC++ project under different OS:

Win XP 32bit: 00:02:50.95

Win 7 32bit: 00:03:09.99

Win 7 64bit: 00:03:19.05

Since the largest solutions I work with can take up to half an hour to build the ~ 1.15x slowdown on Win 7 x64 when compared to XP 32 can cost almost 5 minutes which is not exactly negligible. I have turned off firewall, UAC, and Windows Defender on both Win 7 systems while testing. Are there any other options how to tweak VS2010 performance ? Or is this the best one can get from W7 + VS2010 ? Has anyone else experienced similar problem ? Note that this happens on machine with Windows Experience Index = 7.0 so it should be perfectly capable of running Win 7 and also no performance tweaks were necessary for Win XP.

I would have much preferred to use Win 7 (possibly x64 since the target machine will have 4GB RAM) as there will be some WPF projects soon, but the build slowdown is unexpectedly high in my opinion.

Maybe I did not make my self clear but all the build times are on the same machine on the exact same hardware. The build time does not depend on drive speed, if I run it on SSD or 7200rpm HDD the build time is practically the same (it's much more CPU bound). So my question is not "how to improve VS 2010 performance" but more like "How to get VS 2010 build times on W7 to the same level as on Win XP or if that is even possible / what could be causing such a discrepancy"

Karl 2010-10-13 00:06:38

build times can be faster on fast drives or ssds especially on large projects, compiler needs to fetch source files or their timestamps if cached,..etc. see http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspxalso ntfs compression can increase build times (see comments of the link)

sirmak 2010-10-13 00:17:27

some antivirus softwares can be slow down a bit, too, they're tracing each io operation.

sirmak 2010-10-13 00:24:13

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VS2010 build times Win XP vs. Win 7

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