Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

re: Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

Doug — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:59:42 GMT

The linker! Parallelize the linker!

Link time code generation generates really good code, but beyond a toy project, the build performance is terrible. It is exactly one thread and never even creates a thread at all, let alone is it parallelized. Give the option to use memory for build/link performance. Some of us have 24GB dev machines.

re: Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

Xero — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:07:16 GMT

On stackoverflow question mentioned above, the answer from "vulcan raven" is the official Microsoft VS team reply. But how nice would it be if we have such optimizations automatically at compile time.

re: Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

Xero — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:04:26 GMT

Please entertain this request: visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../2968768-branch-prediction-optimization OP:

stackoverflow.com/.../why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-an-unsorted-array

We need the loop interchange to compete with the Intel compiler.

re: Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

vcblog — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 20:22:08 GMT

@grumpy - the survey was designed mainly to gather feedback about optimization, runtime performance and build times. Adam is correct in his assessment.

However we don't want to limit any feedback we can gather. Build/compile times are important for us so do feel free to share that feedback in the survey, it is much appreciated.

Again thanks for taking the time to respond to the survey.

Thanks,

Amit Mohindra

Code Generation and Optimization team

re: Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

Adam — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 13:56:16 GMT

grumpy: The questions about build times are probably provided because compiler optimizations are frequently a tradeoff between increased runtime performance and increased compile times.

If your application ran 10% faster, but took 100% longer to compile, is that an acceptable tradeoff? It could be if your build only took a minute or two to begin with. But if your build took over an hour to begin with, you'd probably argue the other way.

re: Optimizing your binaries with the VC++ compiler for optimum performance (Feedback Requested)

grumpy — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:46:27 GMT

There are a few questions in the survey about build times, but the focus seems to be on optimization and run-time performance. So if we have comments about build times (the speed of the compiler/linker), are they out of scope for this survey?