CW10 compilation very slow

[bobelec]

Hello,

I'm wondering if it's normal that with CodeWarrior 10 the compilation time is excessively long.

Compiling a full MC9S08 project takes 22 minutes on a 3GHz Core Duo machine under Windows XP. Classic versions of CW takes a few minutes on another similar machine to compile the same project.

The project directory structure is quite simple with no networked disk access.

thanks for your hints.

[J2MEJediMaster]

Make sure you computer meets the minimum system specs. It needs 1 GB of RAM, and 2 GB RAM would be even better.

Also, make sure you have enough swap space on your C: drive. If you're down to several hundred MB on that drive, you can have performance issues because windows uses it for memory swap space. I'd free up about 3 GB on the C: drive.

---Tom

[Lundin]

How on earth can it need 1 GB RAM?!?!

The most complex Windows programming RAD tools like C++ Builder and Visual Studio  consume < 100kb RAM, and they are probably ten times more complex than CW.

As I strongly doubt the CW dev team managed to fill up 1 GB with fluff, the system spec must be incorrect.

[J2MEJediMaster]

Look at the system specs for Eclipse.

Yes, they're hard to come by on the eclipse.org site. After searching around for the hardware requirements via Google, I've seen a statement for "512 MB RAM, minimum, 1G recommended". That entry was 3 years old. I've seen comments stating that 2 GB was ideal. That fits in with my recommendation where you take the vendor's recommendation and double it.

---Tom

[Lundin]

But how is it even possible to fill 1GB for a simple programming development IDE? As a professional programmer, this is totally beyond me. The most advanced 3D computer games, which are extremely complex and resource demanding are typically around 1GB, because they load up huge 3D worlds in RAM. To make a simple IDE take up as much, you would need immense programming incompetence!

[rocco]

Hi Lundin,

---

Lundin wrote:

But how is it even possible to fill 1GB for a simple programming development IDE?

---

Have you ever seen the Eclipse environment? I would not call it an IDE, it's more like IDE-zilla.

It is designed to allow you to create plug-ins to engineer everything, and then some. The API is the size of Asia. The goal was to have an environment where your hardware, PCB, FPGA, firmware, and thermal development could all coexist and interact. And also support multiple engineers, spread out across the globe. It is not a mere IDE.

---

To make a simple IDE take up as much, you would need immense programming incompetence!

---

Prior to it being released as open-source, Eclipse was developed by IBM. So they had the immense programming incompetence available.

[Mickey]

http://www.screencast.com/users/BlackBox_Studio/folders/Public%20folder/media/5d2b7c14-03b2-4a37-ae3...

[bobelec]

I did many project->clean without success

[NavidadRedivivu]

There are a number of reasons why MCU 10.0 is slower than the "classic" IDE. To enumerate just a few: Eclipse is a huge framework (and slow imho), the tools are called via the command line (in the classical IDE they were integrated as DLL's), the makefile generation (which is a lengthly step which can probably be optimized) and so on. It is probably the price to pay for this de facto standardization of Eclipse as IDE. Of course, it is debatable whether this is good for the end-user or not. In this case, I have no quick answer. It is probably best to just give Freescale this feedback so that they should be able to improve the next versions or maybe get some useful tips from the support engineers (they may have a more educated opinion than me).

[BlackNight]

You might give the beta of CW for MCU10.1 a try:

It accelerated up my compilation speed in the range of 40-50%.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=CW_MCU10_BETA

(you can reach the link from the bottom of the www.freescale.com/cwmcu10 page

You can have it installed in parallel with the 10.0 (this is what I have too). I keep the 10.0 installed, but since the 10.1 I did not switch back to the 10.0 because it was working very well for me. The connection settings have changed from 10.0 to 10.1, but once you have migrated them, that worked well for me.

BK

[bobelec]

Thank you BlackKnight. I'd like to give a try to this beta version but I need a FAE name & email to download it, Could you help me on that point ?

BoB

[darknight]

Hi,

On one project, when I up the Stacksize in file project.prm to 200, the compilation and connection with the 8 bits MCU

seems to be faster.

perhaps a way to resolve this problem ?

[NavidadRedivivu]

No, it is not related in any way to the compilation speed. I wish it was that simple.

[bobelec]

I confirm it's not related to the project. The exact same project is compiling within a few seconds with CW6.3.

Anyway, I played around with the stacksize without success.

In the meantime I happily switched to CW6.3, the customer can't wait :smileywink:

[bobelec]

I have 3GB of RAM and plenty of hard disk space for swapping.

But I also have other softwares using  some kind of licence.dat files and Flex LM license server. Maybe CW is trying to communicate with the license server of something like that.  ?

[stanish]

Hi bobelec,

Yes this is possible. I'd recommend you to e.g. temporarily rename system variable LM_LICENSE_FILE restart and try to build. If the build process is faster then I'd suggest you to add a path to CodeWarrior License as a very first path in the LM_LICENSE_FILE to avoid license checking on remote servers  etc.

Stanish

[bobelec]

Thanks Stanish.

I renamed the LM_LICENSE_FILE environment variable and rebooted and checked that the variable was actually renamed. It didn't make things better. I use the free version of CW10, it seems there are no license file for this version - I couldn't find it.