Any advice for speeding up the compile time in Flex Builder 3?

Question

I run Flex Builder 3 on a mac and as my project grows - the compile time gets longer and longer and longer. I am using some SWC\'s and there is a fair amount of code but it

Answer 1

Slow compile time is most often caused by having large numbers of embedded resources ([Embed] or @Embed).

Option 2 on this article might help you: [http://www.rogue-development.com/blog2/2007/11/slow-flex-builder-compile-and-refresh-solution-modules/]

Answer 2

You may want to explore the command-line compiler found in the Flex SDK, mxmlc. As I recall, Flex Builder 3 seems to hide all the compiler details, but perhaps there are arguments you can append that will help you speed up the compilation.

For example, you may want to set optimize=false which will skip the step of optimizing the bytecode (perhaps reducing compilation time)? This of course comes at the price of performance and file size of the actual application.

More documentation on mxmlc can be found at: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/compilers_13.html.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Go to Project->Properties->Flex Applications. All of the applications listed are compiled each time (even though you have a default set). If you remove everything but the default (don't worry, it won't delete the actual files), it only compiles the default app. This resulted in a significant speed up for me. If you change your default app, it ADDs it to the Flex Applications list - adding to your compile time. You will need to maintain this list to get the quickest compile.

Answer 4

There's no need to use mxmlc on the command line just to be able to add compiler flags. Right click your project in the Flex Navigator, select Properties and then Flex Compiler in the dialog that appears. There you can add any extra compiler flags.

Not sure that there's very much to do though, more code means more compile time, that's just the way it is. If you're not doing a release build (or whatever it's called in Flex Builder) it's unlikely that your compiler settings include optimize to begin with. Better choices to try would be -incremental (which only recompiles the parts that have changed) and -keep-generated-actionscript (which stops the compiler from deleting the ActionScript files it has generated from your application's MXML files).

I very much prefer using mxmlc on the command line (by way of Ant) compared to Flex Builder. Although I don't think that the latter compiles any slower, it feels more sluggish in every way. Using Ant also makes it possible to do more than just compilation when building, and conditional compilation (only compile a SWF or SWC if the source code has actually changed). Check out a blog post of mine for more info on that.

What you could try is the Flex Compiler Shell, another command line tool that can speed things up. Basically it tries to keep as much as possible in memory between builds, so no need to wait for things like the JVM starting up (the Flex compiler is a Java application). On the other hand this is sort of what Flex Builder does anyway.

Answer 5

I always disable "automatic compile" for Flex. It compiles too much, takes too long, and so interrupts my work.

If you have many different project files and all of those needs to be recompiled, but you also have other projects open and don't want to close them always you're doing a build, you can also use Eclipse Working Sets.

Unfortunately, the default Flex Navigator does not support working sets. But you can open the Package Explorer with Window / Show View / .... Click on the little white downward arrow to the topright and select Top Level Elements: Working Sets. You can then add Working Sets (aka groups of projects). Each project needs to be in at least one working set ("Other Projects" being the default), but can be in several.

Now with Project / Build Working Set / ... you can instruct Eclipse to build all the projects in this working set, but none of the others. This is especially useful if you suspect your project references to be sometimes broken - otherwise building the 'topmost' project should trigger subsequent builds automatically.

Answer 6

Usually the first build takes the longest, and then it's pretty quick after that. That's using Vista x64 w/ core 2 duo.

Otherwise, I am nearly certain a Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 965 3.2GHz upgrade processor would speed your Flex building up nicely .. :) :) :)