Visual Studio 2015 Build Time for Small Project

Question

There are many questions on SO about improving the build time in Visual Studio (cf. here , here , etc.), but the vast majority of answers are aimed at projects which are fairly large. Many of these answers (eg increasing amount of parallel builds) will only have a marginal effect on small projects, which is what motivates this question.

I am using Visual Studio Express 2015 with one solution, a single C++ project, containing only three files: an 800-line source file, and two .h files. I am running on Windows 7, my processor is Intel Core i5, CPU 2.60GHz, RAM 8GB.

My build time is a staggering 1 minute or more.

Based on suggestions in other SO threads, I have emptied my %temp% and prefetch directories, but this only had a marginal effect. I changed my code to remove as many warnings as possible. I removed all the unnecessary files from the VS directories for my project. My antivirus is disabled.

Here and here it was suggested that an SSD could help. I find it hard to believe, however, that my performance should be this poor with HDD.

I would be glad to hear any suggestions about this issue. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Some things you can do (not all may be relevant to your code):

Remove unneeded includes.

Build without optimization except for when doing release builds.

Use extern templates where possible.

Split your code into multiple source files so that only a subset of it needs recompilation when you make changes.

Use precompiled headers.