[Libreoffice] building a fast Windows build machine

[Noel Grandin]

Hi

So I volunteered to get my company to sponsor a Windows build-bot. I'm still getting it working, but I thought I'd share
some early conclusions.

I've got an AMD 3.3 GHz 6-core CPU, with 16GB of RAM, 7200RPM 250G SATA6 hard drive.

My build config is:
--with-max-jobs=24
--with-num-cpus=6

CPU and Disk and Memory
---------------------------------
Running on Windows 7, 8G of memory seems to be plenty.
I didn't see the machine using more than 6G during the build.
Some of the initial phases of the build are disk-bound, but the build spends most of it's time completely CPU bound.
All 6 cores are completely maxed out.
It's completely dominated by the Visual Studio compile times, so I don't see much chance for improving this.

Performance Tweaks
-------------------------------
Turned off the page file.
Turned off indexing on the libreoffice directories.
Defrag disk.
Exclude libreoffice directories from scanning in Microsoft Security Essentials.
Exclude common exe's from scanning in Microsoft Security Essentials.
   C:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe;
   C:\cygwin\bin\tar.exe;
   C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe;
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin\cl.exe;

Collectively these made quite a difference.

Conclusion
-------------------
If you want to create a really fast build machine for windows, I would recommend getting as many cores as possible,
preferably a dual-socket motherboard, or looking into commercial distributed build environments like this:
http://www.xoreax.com/make.htm


Disclaimer: http://www.peralex.com/disclaimer.html


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