Tips to make builds faster

Question

Is there any way to make software builds / compilation faster ? We have a build tree c, c++ using makefile that takes close to 2Hrs for fresh builds. I came across few commercial solutions like ElectricAccelerator, Sparkbuild, are there any opensource equivalent ?

Answer 1

In our company we had lots of product that has longer build time like 3-6 hours.

There are 2 techniques we used.

1. Use parallel build by -j option of make
2. Mount RAM as a disk. Then move all the files there and compile. But you need plenty of RAM for it. We used Amazons ec2 instances. It was quite expensive.

Answer 2

You may want to look at distcc, ccache and, of course, -j make option.