Catlee made an interesting discovery while digging through historical data in the buildbot db. Its not just that builds feel slower; they *are* slower!
Its important to point out a few things about this chart:
- The machines used over the year are identical for each OS.
- The times explicitly are for only compile+link of full clobber nightly mozilla-central builds. Times for doing “hg clone” beforehand, or for uploading completed builds afterwards, are explicitly excluded.
- Full clobber builds were measured because incremental builds take wildly different times depending on what was being changed.
- Nothing else is running on these machines.
Linux times wobbled for a bit, but take about the same duration, but OSX and win32 times basically doubled in the last year. Win32 went from ~1h25m to over 3hours, and then back down to 2h30mins!? OSX went from ~1h15m to >2h30m, with an expected dip as we transitioned from “PPC+intel32” to “intel64” to “intel64+intel32” builds. Sure, we’ve added more code for Firefox 4.0, but I find it hard to believe that we added *that* much, and only on OSX, Win32!
Whats going on? Well, therein lies the problem. Its hard to tell what is actually happening during the compile-and-link. Because the hardware, OS, and toolchain were consistent, I find myself looking at the makefiles with fresh interest. A quick scan of my mozilla-central clone on my laptop finds 1,797 files (Makefile, Makefile.in and *.mk files) with a combined total of 152,123 lines – and I’m not sure I found everything?!?
In the past we’ve stumbled across and fixed some bugs in Makefiles which helped speed up compile/link time, but this tangled web of makefiles needs some serious spring cleaning. We don’t know where to start yet, but the payback will be totally worth it. If you are interested in helping, or have any ideas, please let me know.
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