MCUXpresso IDE freezes when interacting with a project having hundreds of build configurations

[chaosdefinition]

Hi,

I have an existing project which was externally configured to have hundreds of build configurations (more specifically, I wrote a script to generate a valid .cproject file that contains 320 build configurations).  When importing this project into MCUXpresso IDE, the IDE froze for a while before starting to report numerous out-of-memory errors.  After finally successfully finishing the import (perhaps a couple hours waiting on the IDE's "Discover compiler built-in language settings" and closing the out-of-memory popups), the IDE will also freeze for a while when I interact with the project (e.g., click on the project in the Project Explorer window) or even when I start the IDE.  I tried the IDE's headless mode as well, but it also took way longer than normal to build a single binary.

It seems that the IDE's performance is not very scalable to the number of build configurations a project can have.  However, I do need to have that many of build configurations in the project (for generating multiple binaries over different configurations).  Is there anything I can change in the IDE that can allow skipping whatever the IDE is doing that causes the freezing?  Thanks for the help!

[PabloAvalos]

Hi @chaosdefinition 

I would like to apologize for the delay. We are experimenting a high volume of questions everyday. I really appreciate your patience.

Regarding your concern, I would like to know what do you refer with 320 build configurations to? In order to help you better with your issue, may you please tell me more insight about your situation? so probably I can reproduce it on my computer and see what is happening to find a possible solution.

Hope you can reply to this message, please let me know if you have more questions.

Best Regards.
Pablo Avalos.

[chaosdefinition]

Hi Pablo,

By build configuration, I meant the set of build configurations in the IDE that allow one to generate different build targets, such as the default Debug and Release build configurations when a project is created.

As with my case, I'm compiling a benchmark suite of multiple programs.  Each program yields a different binary executable and thus requires a separate build configuration.  Reproducing my situation seems not easy, as simply replicating a build configuration 320 times (with distinct names) does not slow down the IDE (technically, closing the project is slowed down proportionally to the number of build configurations but other operations are not).

To be more specific on my case, all source code in my project is contained within the project's src directory, and each program's source code is in a subdirectory of its name (e.g., program foo's code is in src/foo).  I used the IDE's source filter (see the attached screenshot as an example) to configure each program's build configuration to ignore all other programs' source code. Perhaps this is the cause of the slowdown?

Thanks!

Zhuojia Shen

[PabloAvalos]

Hi @chaosdefinition 

Thank you so much for your reply and many thanks for your patience.

Regarding your concern, the only way that we know to have this 320 different programs, it is that you can build the first one and the click on create .bin from .axf file on MCUXpresso, so that .bin can be flashed by using GUI Flash Tool or Flash Magic, so then you can build the 2nd one and create another binary, and so on, so you can have all 320 .bin in a folder and then you can flash them one by one depends on your needs.

Hope this information was helpful, please let me know if you have more questions.

Best Regards.
Pablo Avalos.