Getting MCUXpresso to run well?

[JBM]

Does anybody have any suggestions to get MCUXpresso to run quicker.  My installation:

1) Verifies installed SDKs many times a day

2) Runs the indexer just about every time I change something

3) Refreshing the workspace quite often.

4) Takes ~30 seconds to generate the makefile for builds

I spent 45 minutes yesterday getting four build configurations built and installed on hardware.  That's ridiculous.

I have 16GB of RAM and the system is using about 6.  I am running MCUXpresso 11.10 on Windows 10.  For large projects, it seems to be pretty much unusable - but unfortunately I have to use it for now.

[ErichStyger]

Hi @JBM,

there might be something special with your project or host system causing this. I have large projects with hundreds of source files and don't see this.

Here are a few ideas or things to check:

- if build time is slow on Windows: this is usually caused by the Windows firewall. Excluding the compiler binaries speeds up things a lot.

- make based builds (default with Eclipse) can get slow for large projects. For this I'm using CMake with Eclipse. See https://mcuoneclipse.com/2023/04/19/building-a-triumvirate-from-eclipse-cdt-to-cmake-cmd-and-visual-...

- I see that the SDK only gets refreshed if I add a new SDK (makes sense) or if I'm switching between different IDE versions. Are you switching the IDE?

- Same for the workspace, but one should never share the workspace between different Eclipse/IDE versions (sharing the projects are fine, but not the .metadata folder).

- to speed up debugging: https://mcuoneclipse.com/2012/10/30/speeding-up-the-debug-launch-in-codewarrior/

- slow builds can be caused if you did not correctly rename projects, see https://mcuoneclipse.com/2015/06/06/eclipse-project-refresh-policy-broken-incremental-build-with-ext...

- indexer: check your indexer settings, they should look like below. That the indexer runs if you change a file is intended and fine, but only for the files affected. If not, you probably have loaded a workspace of a wrong IDE version. If you are running extra scripts to change/update files, then this will trigger an indexer re-run. You might disable the indexer in the setting below and do a manual indexer update instead.

- check your workspace .metadata. I hope you have used a new workspace for your IDE 11.10. Check as well the size of your .metadata folder, see https://mcuoneclipse.com/2013/02/02/eclipse-workspace-tips/

I hope this helps,

Erich

[JBM · Accepted solution]

Thanks, I'll try to address your points:

1) I'm running Windows under a VM and don't have anti virus on the VM (just the host machine).  I have turned it off and it didn't seem to make any difference.

2) I don't have the time right now to change over the build systems.  Maybe in the future.

3) I recently upgraded the IDE.  I do have an older version of the IDE that I have to run (NXP only supports a part we use on that version of the IDE) but I only use the other version for specific projects and not the one that I'm experiencing slow builds on.  Part of my problem may have been caused by letting the IDE upgrade a workspace.  

4) I typically like build before launch as it keeps me from debugging the wrong code.  It shouldn't and doesn't appear to, rebuild the project, just do a build and link of changes.

5) I looked at the refresh policy and I don't think this is the issue as I haven't renamed the project.

6) The indexer settings are the same as you have shown.

I'm leaning more toward the IDE auto upgrade of the workspace.  When I have time, I'll recreate the project and see if the problem goes away.

Thanks for the input Erich.