Long compile times in Visual C++ 2010 with large static arrays

Question

We have a C++ project in which there are several large static data tables (arrays of structs) generated by an preprocessing tool and compiled into our project. We've been using VC++ 2008 up to now, but are preparing to move to 2010, and these data tables are suddenly taking a very long time to compile.

As an example, one such table has about 3,000 entries, each of which is a struct containing several ints and pointers, all initialized statically. This one file took ~15 seconds to compile in VC++ 2008, but is taking 30 minutes in VC++ 2010!

As an experiment, I tried splitting this table evenly into 8 tables, each in its own .cpp file, and they compile in 20-30 seconds each. This makes me think that something inside the compiler is O(n^2) in the length of these tables.

Memory usage for cl.exe plateaus at around 400 MB (my machine has 12 GB of RAM), and I do not see any I/O activity once it plateaus, so I believe this is not a disk caching issue.

Does anyone have an idea what could be going on here? Is there some compiler feature I can turn off to get back to sane compile times?

Here is a sample of the data in the table:

//  cid (0 = 0x0)
{
    OID_cid,
    OTYP_Cid,
    0 | FOPTI_GetFn,
    NULL,
    0,
    NULL,
    (PFNGET_VOID) static_cast<PFNGET_CID>(&CBasic::Cid),
    NULL,
    CID_Basic,
    "cid",
    OID_Identity,
    0,
    NULL,
},

//  IS_DERIVED_FROM (1 = 0x1)
{
    OID_IS_DERIVED_FROM,
    OTYP_Bool,
    0 | FOPTI_Fn,
    COptThunkMgr::ThunkOptBasicIS_DERIVED_FROM,
    false,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    CID_Basic,
    "IS_DERIVED_FROM",
    OID_Nil,
    0,
    &COptionInfoMgr::s_aFnsig[0],
},

//  FIRE_TRIGGER_EVENT (2 = 0x2)
{
    OID_FIRE_TRIGGER_EVENT,
    OTYP_Void,
    0 | FOPTI_Fn,
    COptThunkMgr::ThunkOptBasicFIRE_TRIGGER_EVENT,
    false,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    CID_Basic,
    "FIRE_TRIGGER_EVENT",
    OID_Nil,
    0,
    NULL,
},

//  FIRE_UNTRIGGER_EVENT (3 = 0x3)
{
    OID_FIRE_UNTRIGGER_EVENT,
    OTYP_Void,
    0 | FOPTI_Fn,
    COptThunkMgr::ThunkOptBasicFIRE_UNTRIGGER_EVENT,
    false,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    NULL,
    CID_Basic,
    "FIRE_UNTRIGGER_EVENT",
    OID_Nil,
    0,
    NULL,
},

As you can see, it includes various ints and enums as well as a few literal strings, function pointers and pointers into other static data tables.

Answer 1

Might be worth turning off all optimisation on this file (it's not going to buy you anything anyway) in case it's the optimiser that is going N^2.