I’ve been trying to improve the build times for my product. We’re using continuous integration, and our builds are now taking 2 hours to run.
I’ve looked at the NANT timings and see alot of places that are slower than they should be, but one that jumps out is the x64 builds of our Visual C++ projects. Here’s an example of the timings compared to x86 builds of the same code:
Release Win32: 8′ 49″
Release x64: 41′ 8″
x64 is about 5x slower. Again, this is for the exact same code.
Has anyone else experienced this sort of build time disparity between x86 and x64? Any suggestions for closing the gap?
NOTE: I am aware of tools to improve build performance overall, like Xoreax distributed builds and TeamCity concurrent builds, and I’m going to investigate both of those as well, but I can’t help but feel there should be some way to get x64 builds back in line without resorting to third party tools.
Check if the project build settings are the same for both. When you select x64, VS basically loads new project settings and they can be very well quite different. For example check if incremental building is enabled in x64.