Low performance of Incremental linking in Visual Studio C++

Question

I have a large binary which is built of many static libs and standalone cpp files. It is configured to use incremental linking, all optimizations are disabled by /Od - it is debug build.

I noticed that if I change any standalone cpp file then incremental linking runs fast - 1 min. But if I change any cpp in any static lib then it runs long - 10 min, the same time as ordinary linking. In this case I gain no benefit from incremental linking. Is it possible to speedup it? I use VS2005.

Answer 1

Set "Use Library Dependency Inputs" in the Linker General property page for your project. That will link the individual .obj files from the dependency .lib instead of the .lib, which may have some different side effects.