Slow Nios II Build and Download Times

[Altera_Forum]

Hi All, 

 I just started using the Nios IDE, starting out with the hello world test program, and the entire build and download process seems very slow.  I'm using Nios II IDE 9.0 SP2, and I'm seeing build times of about 2min 45sec, and download/debug prepare times of about 50sec. I was using the Xilinx EDK SDK before this, and I found it to have good build and download speed (about 5-10sec each on a ~1000 line program).  The actual compile and download times are reasonable, but it spends most of the time seemingly doing nothing in-between those processes. For example, the console displays "make -s all includes" for 1min 45sec before doing anything else, and during that time many instances of sh.exe are created an killed repeatedly in the task manager.  Also, in debug, when I kill and restart my code running on the Nios, it recompiles even though I made no changes to the source. This gets very annoying with the long compile times.  This project is running on the "cycloneIII_3c120_dev_niosII_standard" demo that comes with the 3C120 board. The program is run from the 64MB DDR2 memory, and prints to the JTAG UART.  Is there anything I can do to speed up the compile/download times? How do I set it to not recompile on every relaunch?  Regards, David

[Altera_Forum]

As it seems you're using Windows, the Cygwin layer emulation slows down every thing, compile process in Linux is much faster. 

 Every Nios II project has a related run-time library, its compilation time is longer than in main project, if you don't change your sopc builder system, run-time library is not recompiled.   Are you sure compile messages are showed even if you didn't change the code (gcc calls)?

[Altera_Forum]

Correct, this is on Windows. Cygwin will slow it down, but Xilinx uses Cygwin too, and it's not anywhere near this slow. 

 A full build of everything including the runtime library takes about 8-10min, building after a change to one source file takes about 2min 15sec, most of that while "make -s all includes" is being displayed.  During the build, I saw compile messages indicating that only the source file I changed was being recompiled. Building again immediately with no source changes takes 1min 50sec.

[Altera_Forum]

Have you tried a Cygwin upgrade? 

What about a console compilation, using a Makefile? I have seen this extremely long compilation times on windows vista.

[Altera_Forum]

I installed the dev tools on another computer (XP, P4 2.4GHz) and the build times there are very good, a full rebuild is about 2min, and a build after changing one source file is 7sec. So something is up with my main PC (XP, Core 2 duo 2.67GHz) that's causing the slowness. Reinstalling the dev tools on my main PC didn't help. 

 Could the Cygwin installed with the Xilinx tools cause a problem like this?  I haven't tried updating Cygwin yet. Can I just install it using the Cygwin installer, or do I need to copy files into the Altera directory?  I'm not sure how to do a command line build.

[Altera_Forum]

Try uninstalling Xilinx tools and any other Cygwin environment.. 

 To upgrade cygwin here is a post could help http://alterauserforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1185

[Altera_Forum]

You can disable the build before run option in the IDE. Go to the Tool menu, Preferences, on the left open "Run/Debug" and select "Launching" and disable "Build (if required) before launch" 

The IDE build process is very slow on my system. I don't know if it is because my project is on the network (gigabit) or because I have another cygwin installation for Mentor Graphics.

[Altera_Forum]

I seem to have solved the problem. Following parrado's suggestion, I uninstalled the Xilinx tools and removed the references to them from the Path environment variable. This initially did nothing, but after logging off and back on, the build times are now quick.  

  Thanks for the suggestions everyone!