[Mingw-users] re: not a toy (ld slow)

[Jeff W. <jwi...@mf...>]

> From: "Miroslav Fidler" <cx...@nt...>
> To: <min...@li...>
> Subject: Re: [Mingw-users] Re: not a toy
> Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2003 14:50:35 +0100
>     Anyway, I definitely WAS succesful changing our GCC build process so
> that it compiles a whole bunch of files in single go - and it resulted of
> real 4 times speedup in large rebuilds. It is still not as fast as MSC is -
> MSC can use the same technology too, giving it another 25% advantage.
> Anyway, total compile time dropped from 45 minutes to about 12 minutes,
> which is something I can live with. (MSC dropped from 4 minutes to 3).
> 
>     If only LD was somewhat better/faster... Out of that 12 minutes, 2
> minutes are linking - which unfortunately means that any rebuild, not just
> complete, will be at least 2 minutes. But perhaps the solution is to use
> .dlls for group of related files for debug builds, even if I plan to ship
> release executable as single .exe.
> 
> Mirek

I've noticed that ld seems to spend a tremendous amount of time 
not using any CPU at all which leads me to conclude it is waiting on 
disk access.  

Has anyone else notice this?  Sometimes it might take 2 minutes to
link my project in debug mode.  When I bring up the task manager
LD will sometimes go for 10 seconds at a time without using any
CPU at all.

Other times, when ld is running, if I try to open up a file in
a text editor, by right clicking and choosing open with... 
nothing will happen and explorer locks up.  Then the very instant
ld completes my file opens in the editor.  and this happens
even when I try to open a file 100% totally unrelated to the cpp
code. (i.e. c\foo.txt)

Anyways maybe this is something better suited as a bug report, but
just curious if anyone else experience this.

Jeff