speedy recompiles

[Paul Johnson]

On 10/30/07, Chris Jones <jonesc at hep.phy.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> > ccache?  Its usefullness is somewhere near the top of the list, right below
> > bottled beer and sliced bread.  It cuts out 50 to 95% of the time to do a
> > repeat compile, costs you maybe 5% longer on the first use.  Indispensable
> > IMO.  Don't do another make without it.
>
> You are not wrong. Quickly this utility has been added to the top of my
> my "wish I knew about it years ago" list..
>
> Chris

Ccache is wonderful.  I noticed the speedup on recompiles and couldn't
hardly believe it.  On a machine that I upgraded from FC6, I noticed
the compiles were slow, and that is because ccache was not installed
as a part of the upgrade.  But on a fresh F7, whoa, watch out.  Major
improvement.

The F7 release announced a lot of changes that I never use (Xen). For
my (free) money, ccache was the biggest improvement I've seen in
Fedora 7.

Only downside I can see is that the ccache seems to be stashed in a
hidden user home directory.  After building some really programs like
firefox or gcc, that is one monsterously big hidden directory. Since I
did not know ccache was even installed on that system, it took a
little back-tracking to figure out why the backup of my home directory
was failing because it exhausted the space on the backup device.

Small price to pay for such massive acceleration, though.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas