6
Background:
We have a C# solution with 49 projects and it uses VS2005 SP1 (didn't upgrade to higher version due to old version of Syncfusion 4.x lib). The project uses Ant with ISharpCode zip library for packing components and much of the build time is used here. I usually built it in my office PC and home PC. Due to my recent modification in project to support win7 x64, one of the team member (lived in USA) complained that it is slower than ever and took about 7-10 min.
So, I tested it in my office and home PC. Here are the PC specs and build times – a full rebuild of all attached projects:
Office PC: Intel Core-i3 540 3.0 GHz, 2 cores, 4MB L3, 4GB RAM (1333-DDR3), Win7 x64 Ultimate (recent installation)
Build time: 1 min 13 sec.
Home PC: Intel Pentium Dual E2160 1.8 GHz, 2 cores, 1MB L2, 4GB RAM (1333-DDR3), Win7 x64 Ultimate (old installation)
Build time: 3 min 36 sec.
For mobility and faster build than my office & home PC, I've bought a
Dell XPS L502X laptop with Core i7 2630QM 2.0 GHz, 4 cores, 8 threads, 6MB Cache, 4GB RAM (1333-DDR3), Win7 x64 Home premium configuration.
Build time: 1 min 28/30 sec
Both PCs (not laptop) had multiple IDE running (not building anything). And both PCs and laptop have Avast Antivirus and Comodo firewall installed (sometime affects the build for the first time). It should have taken less time than core i3 system.
My old office PC (replaced by i3) with Pentium Dual Core 2.6 GHz 2GB RAM and Win7 x86 ultimate used to take about 2 min 25 sec to build another almost similar project (47 projects attached). Upon my request, I'd been given core i3 machine which took the same project (^) to build about 1 min 46 sec.
These things were considered to buy Core i7. But I'm disappointed.
Is there any specific reason for the slowness?
In newer versions of VS you can enable parallel builds (IIRC new feature in 2008), this would allow use of multiple cores which would certainly help at the compression (and other CPU bound) stages. – Richard – 2011-09-25T11:00:14.570
1It is the core speed on the i7 letting you down. It would have been ok if you had the quad core model. – Lee Armstrong – 2011-09-25T10:49:52.137
1Maybe the crapload of Dell software that your computer came with are making it slow? The first thing I do when I buy a new computer is to install a fresh copy of Windows to ensure that all the garbage is thrown away. Once you do that you could start working with your computer. – Darin Dimitrov – 2011-09-25T11:46:01.790
3I think your bottleneck here is disk I/O. In my experience laptop disk controllers and seem slower than their desktop equivalents. Also laptops often ship with 5400RPM disks which are fairly pedestrian devices. I'd focus there to try and solve your performance issues. Maybe a SSD would help aleviate this. I'm also going to migrate this to super user because I don't think this issue is specific to Visual Studio. Also the guys there live for this kind of problem solving so you're more likely to get a better informed answer. – Kev – 2011-09-25T11:48:12.343
@Kev: The hard disk model is Seagate ST9500423AS 7200RPM link.
– MARK002-MAB – 2011-09-25T14:08:52.543