dev drive performance for c++

Question

I'm interested in converting my development partition to a dev-drive. There are a few benchmarks out there for different projects, but not for c++ projects with Visual Studio.

Does anyone have experience with this? What I'm mostly interested in is the build performance (compile and link) of big projects.

Answer 1

From the blog post with additional details:

CoW links, instead of file copies, are an excellent match for any build or tool that:

• Makes explicit file copies to create image layouts, such as for microservice deployments.
• Uses MSBuild or dotnet for C# builds, as the Resolve Assembly References build task copies .NET assemblies from package directories and parent projects into each new output directory.
• Uses MSBuild and other items where MSBuild performs a copy recursively in each dependent project. (See Appendix B for ways to change this behavior.)
• Uses caching build engines and accelerators, such as Microsoft Build Accelerator, that copy files from a local cache directory into the filesystem when a cache hit is processed.

None of this fits particularly well with a typical C++ build process, I'm afraid: dependencies tend to be installed and built globally and the compilation of your own code tends not to be cached or even cachable.