Hi, long-time Ninja fan here.
I used a script in Tup's test suite to generate some projects with 1k,
10k and 100k C files to test the performance of Ninja vs. GNU Make
(on Linux).
There isn't much difference in full builds from a clean checkout. For
no-op builds, Make still takes <1s with 10k source files (Ninja takes
0.13s). At 100k source files Make's performance explodes a bit, to 73s
vs. Ninja's 1.5s -- pretty much all of Make's time goes into processing
the 100k ".d" dependency files corresponding to the 100k source files.
More details here:
http://david.rothlis.net/ninja-benchmark/Cheers,
Dave.