I want to ask how much influence does the CPU, RAM, etc. of my PC have on the compilation time? I am considering buying a newer machine and thereby speed up the compilation of the project in AS, which in some cases takes a very long time.
Do you have any internal comparison at BaR to see if CPU performance has any influence on the compilation speed?
I currently have a laptop that is about 4 years old:
The compilation on my PC is not affected in any way by the antivirus program.
MacBook: M1 Max apple silicon → Virtual machine: 4-core cpu with 24GB ram
APC910: i7-6820QM with 32GB ram
Old MacBook: Same as your CPU and ram capacity
In my personal experience, I think there are small advantages when build a project. However, it is not proportional to the performance of the processor.
The performance of No. 1 and No. 5 is more than 4 times, but the build time is less than 2 times.
However, the forced shutdown frequency of Automation Studio is definitely lower.
I’m not aware of any measurement, but generally Oliver is right; especially the speed of SSD can play a crucial role. But as @seunghwa mentioned, you cannot expect that a 2x faster SSD will speed up compilation 2x. And the same can be applied to the rest.
And one last note from me: if you have a feeling that compilation is slow, maybe you can ask a local support colleague and check with them the structure of your project. Again, a general claim: bigger structure, more files → higher compilation time and there are much more what can be checked. BUt this can NOT be done here at Community.
For the gcc compiler you can find some benchmark online. We are currently using the 11.3 compiler of gcc for some tasks in AS6, so this one should be quite close to what you are looking for. Should give you at least a rough estimate.
As for all our own compilers I don’t know if there are documents, that someone from the support would have to check.
We did some investigation ourself when we upgraded our development laptops a few months ago.
The result is as many here already mentioned:
Better SSD help a lot, a better processor also.
Take these numbers with a grain of salt as two systems are never the same and our projects may differ a lot.
But maybe these numbers can help you estimate how your new system will perform.
The measured compile time is a complete rebuild including widget libraries etc.
Important sidenote
Years ago we relaized that our Antivirus system had a hughe performance impact.
We are talking about 5 to 10x here.
The conclusion was:
Every file access or modification while compiling was doublechecked by our antivirus. This then caused this huge performance hit.
We ended up saving our projects in a specific folder and added a company wide (or rather developer-wide) exception for this folder.
