Xcode Build Optimization – Exhaustive list of ways to speed up your Xcode build

https://blog.flexiple.com/xcode-build-optimization-a-definitive-guide/

by hrishikesh1990 • 7 years ago

37 16 7 years ago

blog.flexiple.com

slacka2• 7 years ago

"Definitive Guide"..."Exhaustive"? Really? So why do I only find tips like changing from debug to release, or enabling 'Parallel build' which is enabled by default? And no mention of ccache? It's as simple as

    $ brew install ccache

Which will drop partial compile times from minutes to seconds.

I suggest people who are upvoting this actual look at the contents. I'm by no means an expert, but I found this "definitive guide" worthless. My guess is the author was learning how to use Xcode and these are his notes.

stefan_• 7 years ago

Presumably bots, like this other submission of op:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361463

azhenley• 7 years ago

Those comments are cringey. I never thought bots were really on HN...

melling• 7 years ago

I believe Swift occasionally has problems with type inference. If you time your builds and functions then you'll see where you need to add an explicit type.

I've also noticed image and color Assets take a while for an initial build.

For example, this little app of mine takes 25 seconds for a full build, and less than 1 second for an incremental, probably due to the 100 pictures.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237

hrishikesh19904• 7 years ago

Interesting points. Will give this a try myself.

ajconway• 7 years ago

Unfortunately ccache does not help with swift.

slacka2• 7 years ago

True, but this supposed "Definitive Guide" has plenty of references to Objective-C where it does help. My point was that I'm not an expert, and I see things missing.

nnd• 7 years ago

Does it require any additional configuration?

saagarjha• 7 years ago

If you’re not doing a great deal of debugging, it is better to set this to ‘Optimize for Speed’. This will eventually reduce the build time as the compiler will omit the steps of attaching values to the debugger thread.

I would expect this to increase build times.

hrishikesh19904• 7 years ago

It actually does reduce build time. Screenshots of the same for the sample project are shown just below.

bluedino• 7 years ago

This is Hacker News, not Hacker Noon.

shepting2• 7 years ago

It would be great if this list would include Buck or Bazel and their associated HTTP caches. For us we lowered our clean CI build times from 22 minutes to 4.5 minutes (1 million lines of Swift)

hrishikesh19904• 7 years ago

That is something! TODO - research and write about Buck/ Bazel.

shepting2• 7 years ago

This is a decent sample project to start with: https://github.com/airbnb/BuckSample

Xcode Build Optimization – Exhaustive list of ways to speed up your Xcode build

Related Stories