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Incredibly long compile times?

Development Discussion C++ Gameplay Programming
#1

Anyone else run into bizarrely long compile times on decent hardware?

I have a PC tower that compiles unreal in about 15 minutes from 3 years ago and a 1 year old gaming laptop that takes about 85 minutes. I’m at a loss for why it’s this bad on my laptop.

The PC tower is custom built has a 6 core i7 with 32 gigs of RAM. The laptop has a 4 core i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. To be specific it’s Asus Republic of Gamers Strix laptop from about a year ago with a GTX 1070 and is great for VR.

I tried moving all unreal source and game source to the main SSD off of the 1 TB non-SSD and it’s still super slow.

Sometimes I hit run and the compiler output is stuck for what feels like 10 minutes before it even starts printing out .cpp file names that it’s making progress on. I usually watch a random youtube video while I wait and come back to see the compiler didn’t even start.

My even older PC tower from around 2010 with an i5 and 8 GB RAM was able to compile unreal in about 40 minutes and never exhibited the kind of completely stuck behavior that this laptop goes through.

#2

i5 and i7 doesn’t describe what the CPU is able to do. You need to specify what exact CPU you got then you can look at benchmarks and see how high your CPU is ranked. The storage Drive you use won’t give a significant difference as you already noticed, it is primarily the CPU capabilities and RAM speed that decides how fast it compiles. The more cores the better since compiling can be done safely in parallel.

#3

Any laptop has to compromise between battery life and performance. However, they also provide software that lets you change settings to get better performance when plugged in. Start with the Windows Advanced Power settings and max everything out. I don’t know if Acer has custom software for setting modes, but you will want to check that as well.

#4

I just tried another build and it was about 66 mins. Not sure if I truly fixed anything or it’s just random variance.

I made sure it’s in high performance mode and plugged in.

The CPU is i7-7700HQ 2.80 Ghz Quad Core with Hyperthreading. It’s not the fastest or anything but I’d think it should be much faster than what it is now. It’s good for gaming and VR, maybe not amazing for high demand work, but that’s what I have my desktop for.

I read that putting the sources on SSD was pretty important which is why I tried moving to the SSD.

Also I noticed it compiles 4 at a time not 8 even though I have a quad core CPU with hyperthreading, so 8 logical cores.