General Performance Boost Tips

Incredibuild employs caching mechanisms on many levels. These caches build over time; therefore, the more you use Incredibuild, the better overall performance you should receive. However, if you have been using Incredibuild for a while and still have issues, try one of the following: 

• If you see that your build is distributed to all of the Agents that are connected to the Coordinator, adding more machines to the network will probably yield a performance boost.

• If your local machine becomes unresponsive/saturated during the build, you can go to the Agent Settings dialog box and select the “Avoid Task Execution on local machine when possible” check box. This will free up resources on the local machine and allow it to utilize more Helper Agents.

Visual Studio Optimizations

• If you have several configurations that you would like to build, you can use the Batch Build dialog box to run the builds of both configurations in parallel. The Batch Build dialog box can be accessed either through the integrated menu in Visual Studio, or by right clicking a .sln file in Windows Explorer, and then selecting the “Build with Incredibuild" option.

• Modify the /GL setting. For details, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/gl-whole-program-optimization.

• If your Link tasks are taking longer in the Build Monitor:

  • Turn off the linker debugging feature in Visual Studio. If you do not want to turn off this feature, you can use Incremental or Fast Linking debug options instead. For details, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/debug-generate-debug-info.

  • If the issue persists, make sure there are not too many Linker dependencies.

  • Use /Z7 Debugging Information Format. For details, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/z7-zi-zi-debug-information-format.

  • Turn off /VERBOSE. For details, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/verbose-print-progress-messages.