Which PC components make the biggest impact on your compile times for Visual Studio?

Solution 1:

Scott Gu also posted about what affects building speed, pointing mainly to I/O resources such as the hard disk.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

Solution 2:

The factor that I've found makes the biggest difference isn't a physical factor, but a software one: Which anti-virus do you have installed?

Some anti-virus products don't handle software development very well - they see all these application files being rewritten, suspect foul-play and rescan every file every time.

(See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170078/is-it-usual-for-aspx-files-to-take-5-10-seconds-to-save/1170129#1170129 for more.)

On the other hand, if you're wanting to improve the performance of an existing machine, nothing beats maxing out available memory for a quick win.

Solution 3:

Here's some nice research from Scott Hanselman on using multiple CPUs for MSBUild. The speed-ups are pretty dramatic.

Edit: I should note however, that in order to have a good experience using Visual Studio, you need plenty of RAM. :)

Solution 4:

My personal experience with a fair-sized C++ code base:

Old machine

Processor: Pentium 4 HT 3.06 GHz
Memory: 1 GB DDR RAM (PC 2100, so 333 MHz)
Disk: 7200 RPM hard drive (UDMA 100, if memory serves)
Compile time: 50 minutes

New machine:

Processor: Core i7 720QM (8 logical processors) at 1.6 GHz, turbo boost to 1.73 GHz when all cores are active
Memory: 8 GB DDR3 RAM at 1066 MHz
Disk: 7200 RPM hard drive (SATA 2)
Compile time: 4 minutes (with /MP)

Conclusion: The more processors, the merrier -- even at relatively low clock speeds. An SSD would improve times further, but from observation of the compilation messages, I doubt it would improve it by more than 30 seconds or so.