Currently I work at a compagny where I`m writting a new renderer for there inhouse game engine. The engine is being developed in C++ using visual studio. It has about 300 source files between 2 and 50 kb).

When I started working there I had a temporary computer, an amd dual core 4800 with 1 gb of mem. Compiling and linking the entire engine took about 45 minutes! Now I have a new intel 6600 quadcore machine with 2 gb of mem and compiling still takes 30 minutes. We also use a program called incredibuild which let other computers aid you in compiling with there idle cpu time via the netwerk. This let`s you use up to 10 other pc`s. Linking is still done on the host machine. Even with this a complete build takes 12 minutes. And when in debug visual studio generates about 300 mb of files it uses for debug. ALso when linking, the process that does this comsumes over a gig of memory!

When I compare this with my experience with delphi this is just insane. My own engine (+- 75 source files) compiles and links in 10 to 15 second in a cleaned workspace. Also I once worked on a large database application with about 200 sourcefiles and a complete build on a single machine took about 3 minutes. Memory usage of my Delphi 2007 is between 60 and 100 mb.

Why does Visual studio needs so much power and resources? I asked this to a few seniors and none of them had any good awnser. They where even more amazed when I showed them compilation of my own engine project.

Today I did a fun expirement by recording every minute I had to wait for compiling and linking. The total count was 52 minutes! 2 complete rebuild after SVN update and a lot of 3 minutes waiting periods for building the renderer, linking the dll and testing the changes.

Can anyone shed any light on this?