Increasing Build Performance The Easy Way
15 December, 2009 § 4 Comments
Yesterday I just got my new computer set up. I had been using an old HP Pavilion dv1000 since about mid-summer 2009 until I couldn’t bare with the slow speed any longer.
This new computer is everything I have been looking for and more. I went and pulled out all the stops, yet I don’t follow computer hardware that much (I like the software side a little more).
To determine what hardware setup I should purchase, I went back to the Chromium Build Instructions for Windows. There is a section within the page that talks about speeding up the build.
Accelerating the buildIn decreasing order of speedup:
- Use a true multicore processor; ie. an Intel Core Duo or later; not a Pentium 4 HT.
- Use a x64 OS otherwise incremental linking is disabled.
- Have 8 gigs of RAM.
- Use VS2008
- Disable your anti-virus software for .ilk, .pdb, .cc, .h files and only check for viruses on modify. Disable scanning the directory where your sources reside.
- Store and build the Chromium code on a second hard drive. It won’t really speed up the build but at least your computer will stay responsive when you do gclient sync or a build.
- Defragment your hard drive regularly.
Using the above information, I purchased the following setup from Ascendtech:
- Intel i7 920 with 8 GB of RAM
- Two hard drives, 750 GB and 160 GB
- Two 24 inch ViewSonic VX2433wm displays
- Two Articulating Wall Mounts by VideoSecu for the displays
Here’s a picture of the performance tab of Task Manager 🙂
JAWS 
Nice specs! I’m also in the market (though an i7 is probably not on the horizon). Intel’s spec site shows the 920 as a quad core, but your task manager shows 8…?
I actually guessed that you had upgraded since I noticed this morning that your mercurial username had changed from its usual to “Jared ” :).
Have fun!
According to Intel’s website, the i7 is a quad core that uses HyperThreading to split the cores and make 8 processing threads.
I noticed that my username changed too but I’m not sure why 😀
I’ll let you know how the computer keeps up. It’s currently running VS2010 flawlessly.
That’s a pretty sweet machine. 8GB might very well be greater than or equal to the sum of all my computer’s ram of any machine I’ve owned. Plus the twin 24-inch monitors.
I unfortunately need to defragment my hard drive. I have a feeling this explains why its been slowing.
Is your machine running Windows?
I’ve had bad experience with Windows. I don’t know if it’s the registry or some other component, but the OS just seems to get slower with time. The cheapest way to get your performance back would be to reformat and reinstall the OS.
With proper backups, this shouldn’t be so painful.