Speeding up Chromium build

Question

I am building Chromium on Windows using Visual Studio 2010. I have followed all of the suggestions for building Chromium in as "little" time as possible (http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-windows#TOC-Accelerating-the-build) (e.g., using precompiled headers, component build). However, still my Chromium build takes more than 2 hours! Worse, if I make any change in the V8, it tries to build all the dependencies (Chromium has 526 Visual Studio Projects, and V8 is pretty far up in the dependency tree). Is there any way to speed up the build times? For example, it takes about 20 minutes to build Firefox, and as Mozilla supports incremental building, changes in the code (e.g., spidermonkey) just requires building that module (which takes about 1 min at the most). I am running Windows 7 Professional (x64) on a Core-i7 machine (2.80 GHz). The only problem I might have would be due to RAM, which is a mere 4GB. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Follow these instructions for accelerating Chromium build

In short these are the most useful steps:

1. Use a true multicore processor /i7
2. Use an x64 OS Have at least 8 GB RAM.
3. Turn on precompiled headers and the component build.
4. Use src/build/some.gyp to only load the targets you care about.
5. Disable your anti-virus software for .ilk, .pdb, .cc, .h files

and

use NINJA