UBT as a distributed compilation tool

[Tom_Looman]

@RPotter;153653

When I say initial setup, I’m not talking about setting the system up, I’m talking about prepping for compile. There is a point where the actual act of building the project normally takes less time than the overhead of the distributed build, which is why I’m saying engine recompiles would be a definite win, whereas recompiling your game project likely would see no benefit at best (assuming the system could detect when dividing the build would not be worthwhile). The question is, how frequently do you need to rebuild large chunks of the engine? If the answer is quite frequently, there’s a good chance you’re probably doing something foolish (frequent changes to shared headers?). I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice to have, and I certainly would support it, but the productivity gain seems minimal.

I misunderstood. I don’t have any figures on setup times and compilation boosts for an avg. ue4 project, but I can say that when working on a project like ShooterGame (which yes, does have very inconvenient header setups for sure) you can notice a decent improvement on just adding one additional machine to compile. When you’re working on larger projects and many coders I cannot believe it would NOT be beneficial to have a shared pool of CPUs to constantly benefit from. Still, you are completely right on keeping headers clean and single machine compilation to a minimum (Epic is doing a great job with this since launch)