We originally had our main application which consists of a single solution and 5 projects in Visual Studio 2003 Professional. There is a linear dependency between the projects (Project 5 depends on project 4 which depends on project 3 and so on). A full rebuild of the solution used to take approximately 15 minutes under VS2003. I used the build timer in VS.

We recently moved to Visual Studio 2005 Professional because a separate internal tool we develop benefited from the use of OMP. Since the tool and our main application share some of the same projects, it required us to upgrade to VS2005 for both. We used the wizard conversion tool to convert from 2003 to 2005. Now a full rebuild of the main application takes approximately 25 minutes. Again, this is using the "build timing" option.

My machine specs are as follows:

A) Dell Optiplex GX620, Intel Pentium D 3.40GHz, 3.50 GB of RAM, Visual Assist installed

I am not the only one experiencing the slowdown. The other developers on the team have also noticed that compiling under VS2005 is slower than VS2003.

Here are the specs for two other machines with the same slowdown issue.

B) Intel Pentium D 3.00GHZ, 3.0 GB of RAM, Visual Assist installed
C) Intel Xeon CPU 3.00 GHz * 2, 3.0 GB of RAM, Visual Assist not installed

I recently built a machine with the following specs at home and it only 15 minutes to compile the VS2005 project (it compiles as fast as 2003).

The specs are:

D) Intel Core2Duo 2.8GHz, 1 GB of RAM, Visual Assist installed

If it makes any difference, we installed VS 2005 alongside VS 2003 (because we still have other projects on 2003).

I also installed the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 but it didn't make any difference in the compile time.

Looking in the Windows Task Manager during compilation, cl.exe is

taking up 50 percent of my total CPU time (since I have dual cpus).

Also, the parallelized builds in 2005 does not help us since our

projects have a linear dependency. I tried setting the "maximum number

of parallel project builds" to 1 but that didn't make a difference in

compile time either.

I am at a loss as to why compiling the C++ project in 2005 is that much slower than 2003 on our work machines. I have searched online but it seems the only slowdown issues I found were related to the IDE itself and not compilation (and nothing specific to Visual C++ either). Also I should clarify that it's the compiling of the source files that is slow. I don't see any problems with the linker as other people have mentioned. I sometimes notice the IDE being unresponsive for a second or two but it doesn't bother me as much.

Does anyone happen to have suggestions on what else I might try to get the compile times back to VS 2003 speeds?

Thanks.
Dara.