I’m trying to optimize my workflow as I still spend quite some time waiting for the computer when it should be the other way ’round IMO.
I’m supposed to hand in topical branches implementing a single feature or fixing a single bug, along with a full build log and regression test report. The project is huge, it takes about 30 minutes to compile on a fairly modern machine when compiling in a snapshot view.
My current workflow thus is to do all development work in a single snapshot view, and when a feature is ready for submission, I create a new dynamic view, merge the relevant changes from the snapshot and start the build/testing procedure overnight.
In a dynamic view, a full build takes about six hours, which is a major PITA, so I’m looking for a way to improve these figures. I’ve toyed with the cache settings, but that doesn’t seem to make much difference. I’m currently pondering writing a script that will create a snapshot view with the same spec as the dynamic view, fetch the files into it and build there, but before I do that I wonder if there is a better way of improving my build times.
- Can I somehow make MVFS cache all retrieved objects locally (I have both lots of harddisk space and RAM), ideally sharing the cache between multiple dynamic views (as I build feature branches, most files are bound to be identical between two different branches)
- Is there any other setting I could tune to speed up local builds?
- Am I doing it wrong (i.e. is there a better workflow for me, considering that snapshot views take about one hour to create)?
Considering that you can have a dynamic view and a snapshot view with the same config spec, I would really recommend:
That way, you get the best of both world:
Even if the config spec might have to change in your case (if you really have to use one view per branch), you still can change the config spec of an existing snapshot view (and still benefit from an incremental update), rather than recreating a snapshot view for each branch you need to compile on.