Out of curiosity, roughly how long does it take to compile a project of this size? Realizing of course that machine specs make that number vary greatly, and in this case, how many machines are on the grid sharing that load...what would be real interesting would be the time to build on a single machine vs. the grid

Compile times can be affected by a large number of factors.  Obviously the number of lines of code can be a factor, but the way the code is laid out and compiler options can have a massive effect.  I've taken projects that took many minutes to compile and speed compile times up by a factor of 10 or more, just through proper use of things like pre-compiled headers and forward declarations (sorry if that's too much geek speak ).

I remember hearing that Windows NT took 19 hours to compile.  Hopefully Stardock aren't approaching that yet...

With Incredibuild, less than a minute.

I guess this

won't work at Stardock anymore.

@Frogboy - forgive me for being curious, but can I ask what you use for your release builds?  Are you using some form of continuous build system?

Sweet. Glad to see that was a worthwhile investment for you...now if the Incredibuild people were smart they'd link this page in their testimonials

Another way to boost build times is a 2nd generation SSD. (80% of the 1st gen drives actually sucked)

On my latest c# project, build times are about 1/5th of what they were. Me likey

I'm kinda surprised there isn't more software designed to compile on a second machine.   

Nice.  If I recall correctly, WETA had it's 3d graphic artist workstations setup to become a virtual render farm overnight while they were producing Lord of the Rings.  This looks like a similar concept, and is a great idea.  It's definitely cheaper than a dedicated "build" server or cluster.

I look forward to the day when I can rent out my spare CPU cycles. 

That would be nice. Most computers are much stronger than needed today. Solitaire can be run even on much worse hardware. At least you have the possibility of participating on a computation of the probability of the existence of little green men (SETI), or lend your CPU time to cancer research. 

I was thinking the same thing. Well played!

Yeah, isn't it awesome   Been using it for about 18 months and loving every single minute of it!!  Just watch out for someones HD filling up.   I've pulled my hair out a couple times trying to figure out why builds were working intermittently only to realize they always failed on the same machine.   Guess what THAT problem was

It's really a good tool. Only problem I had with it was that it still took a long time linking, but the gains on pure compilation are great.

The Symantec C++ compiler did that 10+ years ago, GNU does it, only MS has issues with it. Heck, you need a special option for Visual Studio to even make it use multiple cores!!!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb385193.aspx

Ralph