Alex's Alliterative Adventures

Visual Studio 2008 has a fancy new feature, the /MP build flag, that makes it compile multiple files in parallel. This can result in huge speedups in the compiliation phase on a multicore machine, since it’s pretty common for compilation to dominate a project’s build time.

For those of us who are still toiling away with Visual Studio 2005, there’s still a way to unlock this potentially huge speedup. Visual Studio 2005 actually supports the /MP flag, although it’s officially undocumented. I flipped the switch on all of my projects as soon as I read Herb Sutter’s words of wisdom, and it seemed to work perfectly. A full rebuild used to be spent using only one of my two cores for the majority of my build, but now I’m chugging away with every ounce of computation this computer can muster.