CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-c++
user12322620
user12322620

Reputation:

How to reduce link time in MSVC?

Using LTO in MSVC increased our build time considerably.

Before: Build Time (Release): 00:02:48.2022884

After: Build Time (Release): 00:04:50.1647716

Is there any way to reduce the total link time necessary in MSVC (or in general)?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1494

Answers (1)

Chuck Walbourn
Chuck Walbourn

Reputation: 41067

A lot of work has gone into improving overall linker performance the past few releases, so VS 2019 is a good upgrade for this.

For your 'local' development builds, /DEBUG:FASTLINK can help by avoiding the need to coalesce all the pdbs into one. This doesn't help your overnight builds, but it make as a big difference in your iteration time.

In general the overall time to perform "Whole Program Optimization" / "Link-Time Code Generation" is going to scale by the size of the final EXE. If you have a 'large monolithic' EXE--I've seen some PC games get up into the 100MB+ range--it will take a lot longer than a smaller EXE with a few DLLs.

See:

Upvotes: 3

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