Any advice for speeding up the compile time in Fle

Question

I run Flex Builder 3 on a mac and as my project grows - the compile time gets longer and longer and longer. I am using some SWC's and there is a fair amount of code but it shouldn't take minutes to build and crash daily should it?

Answer 1

As Clement said, use the HellFire Compiler Daemon. If you have multiple modules and more CPU cores on your machine it can compile them in parallel. Another option is to use IntelliJ (the commercial version) which offers the same feature.

Answer 2

I don't use Flex Builder, but I use the Flex SDK compiler everyday and I was wasting tons of time waiting for the MXMLC compiler to do its job until I found Flex Compiler SHell:

http://blog.zarate.tv/2008/12/07/theres-something-called-flex-compiler-shell/

Although in theory Flex Builder already uses this optimizations, might be worth checking.

Answer 3

Slow compile time is most often caused by having large numbers of embedded resources ([Embed] or @Embed).

Option 2 on this article might help you: [http://www.rogue-development.com/blog2/2007/11/slow-flex-builder-compile-and-refresh-solution-modules/]

Answer 4

First of all, comments on some of the response:

1. There is no need to explicitly specify -incremental in Flex Builder because it uses incremental compilation by default.

2. -keep-generated-actionscript is a performance killer because it instructs the compiler to write out AS3 codes generated for MXML components in the middle of the compilation. File I/O in the middle of a compilation means unnecessary pauses and low CPU utilizations.

3. -optimize slows down linking because it instructs the linker to produce smaller SWFs. Note that -optimize=true|false doesn't have any effect on building SWCs because SWCs are libraries and have to be unoptimized.

4. I rarely mess with JVM settings because JVM knows its jobs well and tunes itself quite well at runtime. Most people make matter worse by setting various GC tuning parameters. That said, there are 3 settings most people understand and set correctly for their usage:

-Xmx (max heap size)

-server or -client (HotSpot Server or Client VM)

-XX:+UseSerialGC or -XX:+UseParallelGC (or other non-serial GC)

-server consistently outperforms -client by about 30% when running the Flex compiler. -XX:+UseParallelGC turns on the parallel garbage collector. ideal for multicore computer and when the computer still has CPU cycles to spare.

You may also want to check out HellFire Compiler Daemon (http://bytecode-workshop.com/). It uses multiple processor cores to compile multiple Flex applications at the same time. You can also run the compiler on a second machine via sockets (assuming that your second machine has faster CPUs and more memory).

In my opinion, use more modules than libraries and use HFCD.

Hope this helps.

-Clement

Answer 5

There's no need to use mxmlc on the command line just to be able to add compiler flags. Right click your project in the Flex Navigator, select Properties and then Flex Compiler in the dialog that appears. There you can add any extra compiler flags.

Not sure that there's very much to do though, more code means more compile time, that's just the way it is. If you're not doing a release build (or whatever it's called in Flex Builder) it's unlikely that your compiler settings include optimize to begin with. Better choices to try would be -incremental (which only recompiles the parts that have changed) and -keep-generated-actionscript (which stops the compiler from deleting the ActionScript files it has generated from your application's MXML files).

I very much prefer using mxmlc on the command line (by way of Ant) compared to Flex Builder. Although I don't think that the latter compiles any slower, it feels more sluggish in every way. Using Ant also makes it possible to do more than just compilation when building, and conditional compilation (only compile a SWF or SWC if the source code has actually changed). Check out a blog post of mine for more info on that.

What you could try is the Flex Compiler Shell, another command line tool that can speed things up. Basically it tries to keep as much as possible in memory between builds, so no need to wait for things like the JVM starting up (the Flex compiler is a Java application). On the other hand this is sort of what Flex Builder does anyway.

Answer 6

I created RAM Disk with workspace and it gives up to 10% of better compilation time. Not much, but something.