CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio
Micha
Micha

Reputation: 289

How do I use all cores when building in Visual Studio?

I just tried to compile Unreal Engine as documented by Epic Games.

While building the project in Visual Studio 2017, I noticed that most of my cores are idle:

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Even if I subtract the cores that are only logic (because they are not "real"), half of the cores are more or less inactive. (16 real cores, but only 6-8 of them seem to be really working)

I doubt that other hardware components are a bottleneck. The memory is half-empty and the SSD's are doing basically nothing (arround 1% usage). I've set the maximum number of parallel project builds in the Visual Studio settings to 32.

Is there something I've been missing? Can I do something to get better performance by utilizing more cores?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2318

Answers (1)

Johan Donne
Johan Donne

Reputation: 3285

Not all operations/algorithms are equally suitable for parallelization. Some are inherently sequential in nature. e.g. the sequence in which different projects are built is dictated by the dependencies between them. Furthermore A lot of intermediate files are used during compilation and building. Even when using SSD's, this involves a lot of IO-bound operations where the CPU-core idles. Since a lot of those files are small, they will not cause a lot of throughput but they will involve a significant overhead...

Maybe an interesting read: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/19643/which-algorithms-can-not-be-parallelized

Upvotes: 1

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