1326328 - [meta] Improve Windows build times

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Eric Rahm [:erahm]]

This is a meta bug for tracking various improvements we can make to improve Windows build times.

Comment 1

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

I thought we had such a bug already open...

Comment 2

[Eric Rahm [:erahm]]

(In reply to Mike Hommey [:glandium] from comment #1)
> I thought we had such a bug already open...

Perhaps, but I couldn't find one!

Comment 3

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

I couldn't find one either, surprisingly.

Comment 4

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/10/26/recommendations-to-speed-c-builds-in-visual-studio/ is a good source of bugs that could be filed. We've had discussions on many of those topics before, including precompiled headers (various places, including IRL meetings) and /debug:fastlink (bug 1188823).

For PCH, one of the things that post recommends that we haven't explicitly discussed is doing PCH of just the system headers.

Comment 5

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

Also, we had someone from IncrediBuild reach out to Bill Walker ~18 months ago. I received a forwarded email but never followed up on it. IncrediBuild does look nice. But the fact it costs money and isn't open source is a bit off-putting. I'm sure it's good software. But per-desk software licenses to optimally develop Firefox would be a huge pain.

I've casually mentioned to a few people that Mozilla should invest in creating a proper cross-platform distributed compilation and caching daemon (think sccache + icecc with the killer feature being it works on Windows too). The investment would be either having an employee do it (hi Ted!) or hire a contractor. I'd encourage Ted to assess the feasibility of that. If you run the numbers on what distributed compilation would buy us on Windows, I'm pretty sure we could justify a mid six figures cost to develop said software.

Comment 6

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

(In reply to Mike Hommey [:glandium] from comment #1)
> I thought we had such a bug already open...

bug 459891 :)(In reply to Gregory Szorc [:gps] (away until 2017-03-20) from comment #4)
> For PCH, one of the things that post recommends that we haven't explicitly
> discussed is doing PCH of just the system headers.

PCH has some historical discussion / work in bug 347592 FYI.

Comment 7

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

Looks like incredibuild offers a free version now:

https://www.incredibuild.com/incredibuild-product-overview.html

Note that I just installed that with visual studio community 2017 installer as a package.

Comment 8

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

(In reply to Honza Bambas (:mayhemer) from comment #7)
> Looks like incredibuild offers a free version now:
> 
> https://www.incredibuild.com/incredibuild-product-overview.html
> 
> Note that I just installed that with visual studio community 2017 installer
> as a package.

The "free" stands for "trial".  It's somewhat limited even free (16 cores per machine, 4 machines in a net, IIUC), in 30 days, the limits are even less.

I just roughly tried to make a profile xml file [1] to intercept and remote cl.exe, mozmake.exe etc and I ended up with weird errors, missing unrelated license warnings (turned to be fatal) and overall slowness of configure, and mainly - no distribution of the build :)

definitely not worth my time...

[1] https://www.incredibuild.com/webhelp/#profile_xml_structure.html

Comment 9

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

The active sccache work to add distributed compilation support combined with our desire to move to Clang on Windows makes IncrediBuild largely irrelevant to us.