Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!maccs!cs4g6ag From: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: why are C compiles so slow? Message-ID: <25745107.27981@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> Date: 29 Nov 89 21:58:30 GMT References: <19500044@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario Lines: 25 In article <19500044@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu> beaucham@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu writes: $In developing new programs in C I find that the most time is taken in waiting $for compile and link (including some fairly large libraries). ( I am working $with a genuine 6 MHz AT.) Even if I go to V DISK, it is still slow. My $question is -- What factors most strongly determine the speed of compile? Well, I'm using a 12 MHz AT (1 ws) with a 25 ms hard drive and a 384K disk cache, and using Turbo C 2.0 and TLINK 2.0, and I find things compile and link pretty quickly. Actually, it seems that about 40-60% of the time is spent reading in the header files! Obviously, the speed of your processor, disk transfer rate and seek time are pretty important factors ... what are you putting in your VDISK ... the program, the libraries, everything used in the development cycle? If you have the whole thing on a VDISK and it's still too slow, the only major factor left is your clock speed. Probably the only benefit I get from my disk cache is a) the .c file stays in the cache and b) it performs batch reads from the disk ... I end up accessing much more than 384K of disk during an edit/compile/link cycle. -- Stephen M. Dunn cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca = "\nI'm only an undergraduate!!!\n"; **************************************************************************** They say the best in life is free // but if you don't pay then you don't eat