Build time of Visual Studio 2015?

[Brett Dong]

I have a project that takes about five minutes to build with clang on
Linux (make -j4), optimization enabled (-Os). But it takes me ten
minutes and even more to build with Visual Studio 2015. I tried all the
ways on the Internet that can help reduce build time with Visual Studio:
turned off "Whole Program Optimization", turned off Link Time Code
Generation in the linker (/LTCG:OFF), even turned off any optimizations
in the linker (two options /OPT:REF and /OPT:ICF are turned off), and
turned off PDB debug information generation, turned on incremental
linking (/INCREMENTAL), turned on parallel compiling (/MP). After all
those efforts, it still takes me ten minutes to build the project. Twice
as long as the time clang uses! Why could there be so much difference?

I'm using a SSD, so IO shouldn't be a bottleneck. I'm using a 2-core
4-thread Broadwell-U processor FYI.

[Paavo Helde]

Make sure you are using precompiled headers.

[Ian Collins]

Visual studio is rubbish at parallel builds: even their own people
recommend using a third party tool!

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2015/11/30/improving-your-build-times-with-incredibuild-and-visual-studio-2015/

I've used Incredibuild on single systems and distributed servers and it
works well.

--
Ian