Is it advisable to take an SSD to speed up the compilation of large libraries?

Question

C++ / C#

The question has been ripe for a long time, since the compilation of Qt 4.4, in my opinion. Usually a full build of Qt takes about an hour with all the stray, but you have to completely rebuild it often. Now, with the release of Qt 4.8.1, it has become even more deplorable. As far as I understand, the bottleneck for assembly is the railway. The processor and memory seem to be not bad Intel i5 SB and Kingston KVR1333D3S9 / 4G 1333 MHz. I build in 4-5 threads.

Answer 1

To understand if a hard disk is a bottleneck, it is enough to create a disk in RAM and assemble on it.
Something tells me that the assembly does not need 4Gb of RAM, so the OS can use it to cache files. Therefore, the hard drive should not be the bottleneck. The bottleneck will be the processor.

Answer 2

Just take more memory. It will be the same for the money, and you will get such a speed that all ssds will nervously smoke in the corner. tmpfs, brd - to choose from.
Threat SSD is actually not so fast for writing.

Answer 3

I may not understand everything, but why often rebuild a third-party library? I mean, are you rebuilding it more than once for the same platform/architecture/combination of settings?

Answer 4

SSDs seem to have huge problems with the number of possible overwrites, so if you don’t mind the money ...

Answer 5

SSD will be faster. How much? Unknown.
Rebuilding Qt often is, you know, a perversion, by the way.

Answer 6

On our project (C ++), the impact of SSD is as follows:
- Full rebuild almost did not change (almost everything fits in memory)
- Incremental build accelerated 3-20 times
To speed up incremental build, SSD is an invaluable thing.
To speed up the complete assembly are important:
- memory. When everything fits into memory in the process - well, no, the brakes will go (perhaps an SSD will help a little)
- the processor. The increase in speed is almost proportional to the "power" of the processor
Observations are based on different system configurations in our office
PS VS 2010, 15 Gb RAM, i7 2.8Ghz

Answer 7

I myself use three SSDs and installed a dozen and a half to clients. Not a single one has died from resource exhaustion yet, only the Crucial M4-256 in the box has died when switching between USB ports. I update firmware regularly. Now to the point of the issue. I use a simplified procedure for identifying a bottleneck in the PC's disk subsystem. I look at the red drive activity indicator and launch the most critical application for the client. If the indicator does not have time to go out while the application is running, i.e. data processing is much faster than commands for accessing the drive (it doesn’t matter if it’s for reading or writing), I strongly recommend using an SSD. It is not entirely correct to compare HDDs and SSDs in terms of linear read / write speed, the number of accesses per second that these drives are capable of processing is more important for us.

Answer 8

I am compiling a project on an ultrabook and on a desktop, in an ultrabook SSD, in both 8GB of RAM, in both i5 but in a laptop, of course, it is slower. The project is relatively small, but the build process takes place 4 times (for different platforms) - in MinGW / gcc and in VC. Separately, I didn’t notice the compilers, but in general, the assembly on a laptop with an SSD and a slower processor is almost twice as fast.

Answer 9

On Visual Studio C ++, a project of 40,000 lines takes 2:50 minutes on a screw and 2:10 on an SSD Vertex 4. Processor - Core i7-3770K.

Answer 10

SSDs are just perfect for the build. Fast reading of many small files. At work, builds of C# projects (non-parallel) have halved since switching to SSD.

Answer 11

It's better to speed up by immediately transferring the disk to memory
memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk/
once every X minutes (configurable) the image is saved to disk in a file, so even if the power is unexpectedly turned off, a lot will not be lost