Benchmarking IVF

[Nick2]

I am currently running a P4 530 (3GHz)/1GB RAM @200MHz. Due to source control I have to completely re-build a certain project several times a day and this takes about 7 min in release mode. Would upgrading my CPU help boost this time? What kind of performance improvements can I expect?

[Steven_L_Intel1]

It would be quite an investment to upgrade this system. Sure, you could get much better performance out of a Core 2 Duo system, but that would involve replacing the motherboard, memory and processor. Then again, perhaps all you need is an excuse?

I really couldn't say how much faster compiles would be. A lot depends on whether you're using up all that 1GB of memory (possible in some cases.) But such an upgrade would make your system a lot snappier overall. I recently upgraded from a P4 3.0GHz system to a Core 2 Duo E6700 and I can really tell the difference.

Is the issue you have with source control that the IDE says you have to rebuild any time you change one file?

[Nick2]

For some *strange* reason, I always end up doing my work on my own computer that I build myself.

My issue with the source control we use is that we maintain separately a master file with all the commons used, and then we have all the source files with the names of the commons they use. When I want to check out the source code that I'll actually build, a script inserts the common blocks into the source code, creating the actual files I will actually compile on my PC. It actually works out good; the project where we don't use this method is rather buggy. But unfortunately, this method guarantees different "modified-on" dates, and guarantees to prompt a whole-code re-build.

[jimdempseyatthecove]

When you run the Task Manager during a build, do you have any CPU time remaining?

If so, then consider using MAKE (you must have some version of this).

Instead of issuing IFORT directly, use START to launch a series of batch files. These can run concurrently. At the end of each batch file you can use ECHO to create a file to be used for completion testing by the controlling batch file.

The linux community may have a muti-threadded MAKE utility that runs on Windows.

Jim